Question
My 14-year-old Quarter Horse mare has painless chronic diarrhea, according to my vet. She has had this for seven years, and we have tried everything. She maintains her weight just fine, and she is never dehydrated or lethargic. Her diet is mixed hay, water, and a salt block. We contacted a new vet to try yet again to figure out what could be going on with her. He suggested we pull her off hay and put her on a short-fiber diet and EquiShure hindgut buffer. How much EquiShure do I feed her? I plan on switching her over a 10-day period.
Answer
Have you tried just the EquiShure to see if that helps with the current diet? If you use it with the short-fiber diet, go with the highest recommended dose for the size of the horse (150 g/day). Take the daily total and divide it by the number of meals so that you feed some EquiShure in every meal.
Some horses can develop a paralysis of sorts in the region of the hindgut where the majority of the water is reabsorbed before forming fecal balls. Due to the higher water content of the feces, these horses will not form fecal balls. If the horses are otherwise healthy, the only thing this will potentially affect is the horses’ water intake. They may drink more because the water that would normally return to circulation from the digesta escapes with defecation. If you put her on short fibers and do not see an improvement, then this is probably what has happened to your horse. There is nothing that can be done about this problem, but it is not really a problem for the horse, though it might be cause for extra grooming and care.
If you try the short-fiber route, I have a couple of concerns and suggestions:
(1) Anytime you take all the long-stem fiber out of the diet you have to be very vigilant for colic. You need to make sure the horse gets an adequate amount of feed that has a high enough fiber content to keep the microbial balance in the hindgut. The pelleted short-fiber feed you’re contemplating using is marketed as a complete feed, but if you have hay pellets or alfalfa pellets available, I suggest feeding those as well, just to make sure the horse truly gets enough fiber in the diet.
(2) You should be feeding at least 1.5% body weight of the feed if she will eat it; that is about 15 lb (6.8 kg) of the pellets per day. If possible, it is best to divide the ration into three or four meals per day.
(3) The feed you mentioned is very high in copper (60 mg/kg) and has a poor copper to zinc ratio (1.5; it should be at least 3), and I am concerned about you feeding it as the sole source of feed for the horse. For example, if you feed 17.5 lb (8 kg), it would supply 480 mg copper and the requirement is only 100 mg. If you feed part of the diet as hay pellets and less of the feed, it would not be as much of an issue.
(4) If the horse can have daily access to some pasture grass without interfering with the changed feeding program, I think it would be beneficial for the health of the digestive tract.
