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UC Davis Equine Vet Program Expands With Donation Of Templeton Farms

The UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine's Center for Equine Health is pleased to announce the expansion of our equine facilities to Templeton Farms on California's Central Coast thanks to the donation of the 52-acre property by dedicated equestrian Gina Bornino-Miller.

UC Davis alumnus Bornino-Miller and her late husband William J. Miller opened Templeton Farms for business in 2011 as a world-class sport horse training, sales, and breeding facility near Paso Robles. Templeton Farms has been home to generations of carefully and lovingly bred performance horses, as well as a thriving boarding program.

“I am thrilled to donate Templeton Farms to my alma mater,” said Bornino-Miller. “It was our dream to build a world-class facility and I look forward to seeing it develop further to advance equine health and veterinary education for years to come.”

This generous donation will support the Center for Equine Health's mission to advance the health, welfare, performance and veterinary care of horses through research, education and public service. The additional location will provide new opportunities to bring veterinary students, residents, researchers, and veterinarians together to tackle important problems affecting horse health.

“We are incredibly grateful to Gina for this extraordinary donation that supports the future of equine veterinary medicine,” said Dr. Carrie Finno, director of the Center for Equine Health. “Templeton Farms is a spectacular property with a reputation for excellence and we are committed to providing top-quality care to boarders while enhancing our research and educational efforts to improve horse health and performance.”

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The UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine serves the people of California by providing educational, research, clinical service, and public service programs of the highest quality to advance the health and care of animals, the health of the environment, and public health, and to contribute to the economy.

“UC Davis is known as a leader in equine health,” said Dr. Mark Stetter, dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine. “Gina's trust in us with the farm that she and William founded will give us new opportunities to fulfill our mission to California and to serve the equine community.”

Do Fatty Acids Benefit Foals In Utero?

Omega-3 fatty acids have many favorable health effects on horses, including joint, respiratory, and reproductive benefits. Supplementing pregnant mares with omega-3s late in gestation has advantages for their developing foals. However, not all types of omega-3 supplements fed to mares have the same effectiveness.

The two major sources of omega-3 fatty acids for horses are:

Plant-derived short-chain omega-3 fatty acids, primarily alpha linoleic acid (ALA). High levels of ALA are found in flaxseed, canola oil, and other feedstuffs, but ALA must be converted by the horse to long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, including DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) for optimal use by horses.

Marine-derived omega-3s rich in the specific omega-3 fatty acids DHA and EPA. Providing a direct source of these omega-3 fatty acids may be preferred, as the conversion of ALA to long-chain fatty acids is limited in horses.

No study has determined if the omega-3s offered in a mare's diet actually reaches her unborn foal.

To fill this knowledge gap, researchers recently designed a study to measure omega-3 fatty acid levels in foals from supplemented mares. Three diets that provided a similar total amount of omega-3 fatty acids from two different sources were used. The first was a control diet, the second was the control diet plus a commercial flaxseed supplement, and the third was the control diet with a commercial marine-derived omega-3 supplement.

When mares were offered each of these supplements during the last 30 days of gestation, only marine-derived supplementation resulted in a significant increase in DHA levels in foals.

The DHA measured in blood samples from foals born to mares offered only the control diet was 0.6 g/100 g of lipid (fat). In the foals from mares supplemented with the marine-derived omega-3, the DHA was significantly higher at 1.9 g/100 g lipid.

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“No difference in foal DHA blood levels was observed between the control and flaxseed diets, which means these results support the recommendation to provide a direct source of DHA and EPA due to the low conversion rate of ALA to DHA,” relayed Catherine Whitehouse, M.S., a nutritionist for Kentucky Equine Research.

Even though mares were supplemented during the first five days after foaling and foals were nursing those mares, DHA levels declined rapidly. By day five, DHA levels were similar across all diets. On day 30, which was 25 days after the mares were no longer supplemented, the DHA blood level of the foals was only 0.1 g/100 g lipid.

“Continuing to supplement mares throughout nursing until weaning may help maintain higher DHA levels in foals after foaling, providing long-term advantages to growth and development,” suggested Whitehouse.

EO-3, a marine-derived omega-3 supplement developed by Kentucky Equine Research, provides research-proven levels of DHA and EPA, can be top-dressed onto feed easily.

*Snyder, J. N. Shost, R. Miller, K. Fikes, R. Smith, B. Corl, A. Wagner, I. Girard, and J. Suagee-Bedore 2021. Late gestation supplementation of long-chain fatty acids increases foal docosahexaenoic acid concentrations at birth. Journal of Equine Veterinary Science 100:103522.

Article reprinted courtesy of Kentucky Equine Research (KER). Visit equinews.com for the latest in equine nutrition and management, and subscribe to The Weekly Feed to receive these articles directly (equinews.com/newsletters).

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Why Do Horses Eat Weird Things?

Quality equine nutrition is paramount to keeping horses looking and feeling their best, but some horses eat things they shouldn't, which could lead to colic or cause long-term health issues. Pica is an eating disorder that involves ingesting items that aren't typically considered food.

Some horses eat:

Manure
Called coprophagy, manure eating is natural. Foals eat manure to populate their digestive tract with beneficial bacteria and some adult horses do the same, but eating feces could be a sign that something more is amiss. Adult horses often eat manure because they're lacking in fiber.
Poisonous Plants
Horses often only eat poisonous plants when they have no other forage option. Knowing what plants are poisonous, and removing them, is important to keeping horses safe. Offer plenty of quality forage so the horse doesn't think poisonous plants are the only edible option.
Dirt
Eating dirt is fairly common, but may indicate horses are seeking minerals like salt, copper or zinc. Check his diet to be sure he's receiving the proper amounts of minerals he needs to be healthy.
Tree Bark
Eating tree bark is natural, but some horses chew bark because they are bored. It's important to ensure that the tree bark the horse is eating isn't poisonous. Additionally, if the horse is ingesting so much bark he's harming the tree, fencing horses away from tree trunks may be necessary. Offering a horse-safe logs to chew on is an option.

New Mexico State University To Study New Method Of Mustang Population Control

Throughout the United States, wild horses still roam through the wide-open spaces. While they may be wild and free, they come at a cost to taxpayers, as much as $1 billion from 2019 to 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

That's an opportunity for Wildlife Protection Management, Inc., or WPM, to be a leader in helping the government with humane ways to control population growth and keep the horses, and other wildlife, healthy. Thanks to a $256,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, WPM will work with New Mexico State University faculty to manage the data they've been collecting.

Roch Hart, WPM's CEO, used NMSU's entrepreneur and business incubator Arrowhead Center services to work through the NSF grant application process. WPM had already grown by using several of the Arrowhead Center programs.

Hart first attended the six-week AgSprint, a cohort-based business accelerator that deepened his understanding of the market and future customer needs. He then participated in Arrowhead's Technology Incubator to build the WPM's first vaccine-delivery prototype. The prototype, attached to an alfalfa feeding station, remotely implants radio-frequency identification, or RFID, chips, vaccines and contraceptives into horses.

“We have been highly successful with the RFID. Better than we had hoped,” Hart said. “If we could cut costs by not having to implant every horse with a chip, then we could cut costs considerably. For that, facial recognition technology was the next avenue to explore. New Mexico Small Business Assistance helped us go in that direction first, which helped us to move forward with the NSF grant.”

Hart also used Arrowhead Center's NM Federal and State Technology, or NM FAST, partnership program that provides help to businesses seeking federal funding through the Small Business Innovation Research grants.

“Hart has seen a lot of growth through using the range of programs at Arrowhead Center,” said Del Mackey, senior economic development officer at Arrowhead Center. “The AgSprint program helped him define the need for the tech. NMSBA helped him take it in a new direction, and the NSF SBIR Phase I grant will help him validate the feasibility of using facial recognition alongside the RFID for the identification of not only wild horses but also feral pigs and deer.”

“We do hope to take this technology for horses to other species and scale that technology up. This grant certainly helps that traction,” Hart said.

More traction for WPM will come through the collaboration with NMSU's College of Engineering Associate Professor Laura Boucheron. With the support of a graduate student, Boucheron will spend a year dissecting WPM's data and creating an effective method of animal recognition through videos and images.

“While they have RFID chips, the horses might have recognizable patterns on their faces or flanks or even scars that we can use to build an algorithm that detects individual animals,” Boucheron said. “The ultimate goal is to recognize individual animals based on videos or images and match them up with their RFID identification.”

Boucheron said the collaboration with WPM through Arrowhead Center allows her research to see different applications for her work and help with the inception of entrepreneurial activities.

“What we do can have a direct impact on a problem with the horse population,” she said. “It's something that has quite the real-world applicability.”

Read more at New Mexico State University.

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