Ask the Expert: Fall Grazing

Owners and caretakers of metabolically challenges horses are often aware of the health hazards ingesting lots of fresh, spring grass can bring on their charges, but grazing horses on lush pastures in the fall is fraught with its own set of perils.

Frost damaged pastures can have higher concentrations of nonstructural carbohydrates, leading to an increase in the potential for founder and colic, especially in horses diagnosed with or prone to obesity, laminitis, Cushings disease and Equine Metabolic Syndrome. To help prevent these health issues, at-risk horse owners should wait up to a week before turning horses back onto a pasture after a killing frost. Subsequent frosts are not a concern as the pasture plants were killed during the first frost.

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Why do nonstructural carbohydrates increase during the fall? During the day, plants carry out the process of photosynthesis. In this process, they make carbohydrates as an energy source for the plant. A second process, respiration, is carried out when the plants use up the carbohydrates they produce during the night for energy. Plant respiration slows down when temperatures are near freezing. As a result, the plants hold their carbohydrates overnight. Freezing can stop respiration and lock the carbohydrates in the plant for over a week. Thus, plants tend to contain more carbohydrates in colder temperatures or after a frost. Often, horses will prefer forages after a frost due to the higher carbohydrates levels.

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Bots: Where Fecal Egg Counts Fail

A fecal egg count test is a common horse health practice designed to combat the overuse of equine dewormers and consequent drug resistance. Though the test is helpful in determining which horses need to be treated for parasites, there is one parasite that escapes being found on the screening: bots.

Fecal egg counts don't show the bot load a horse is carrying because bot eggs are not found in horse manure. Bot flies lay eggs on a horse's body, often on the lower legs and chest. As the horse licks the eggs, they hatch and he swallows the larvae, where they enter his digestive tract. The larvae, not eggs, leave via manure and the process begins again.

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Bot fly eggs look like small yellow grains of rice that stick to horse's hair. To remove them, horse owners can use a bot knife, which has a serrated blade, or a fiberglass block, which grabs and removes the eggs.

If bot fly eggs are removed diligently throughout the year, a horse owner may be able to skip deworming for bots – the horse will be fine if he ingests a few. If the horse isn't groomed regularly, however, it's worthwhile to give him a single dose of moxidectin or ivermectin after the first frost.

Read more at EQUUS.

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