Five methods commonly used to cool out horses in hot and humid environment were evaluated to determine which cooled the horses the quickest. The study team used rectal temperature and pulmonary artery blood temperature, which is an indicator of core body temperature, for their findings.
Drs. Yuji Takahashi, Hajime Ohmura, Kazutaka Mukai, Tomoki Shiose and Toshiyuki Takahashi exercised five Thoroughbreds on a treadmill in WetBulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) of nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit. WBGT is a measure of heat stress in direct sunlight; it considers temperature, humidity, sun angle, wind speed and cloud cover. This is different than the heat index, which only takes into consideration humidity and temperature in shady areas.
Each horse was worked at a canter five separate times until their arterial blood temperature reached nearly 108 degrees F. They were then given a different cooling treatment each time. These included:
- Walking on a treadmill with slow fan blowing on the horse
- Walking on a treadmill with two large fans blowing on the horse
- Intermittent cold-water hosing and scraping while walking on a treadmill. Every three minutes the horse was taken off the treadmill and hosed all over his body, but not his head and neck, with 4 gallons of 50 degree water, scraped and returned to the treadmill.
- Intermittent cold-water hosing and no scraping used the same parameters as above, but did not remove the water from the horse
- Continually using cool water on a horse that is not on a treadmill. The horse was hosed all over with water that was nearly 80 degrees F.
The team determined that the fastest method of cooling out a horse was continually hosing the horse with cool water. This lowered the horse's temperature five times faster than intermittent hosing with cold water. Scraping off the water did not affect the rate of cooling.
Read more at Science Direct.
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