Does your horse suffer from coughing, nasal discharge, performance decline, or even difficulty breathing? The reasons for these symptoms are diverse. Possible causes include infectious diseases triggered by agents such as viruses, bacteria, and parasites.
Sensitive horses, weakened immune systems, and contaminated feed all favour infections. Acute respiratory diseases are often not treated promptly or sufficiently, leading to recurring infections or even chronic conditions.
Ignoring Early Signs
Many horse owners may only notice a bit of coughing. At the start of riding, a few small coughs may be heard. After training, some horses may show slight nasal discharge. However, these signs are often not just a "little cough" and "a bit of nasal discharge," but rather the beginning of a chronic condition.
Failure to treat can have serious consequences. The "little cough" and "bit of nasal discharge" can escalate into a significant chronic problem faster than you'd wish. The course of such chronic respiratory diseases is varied, affecting each horse differently. However, it's clear that constant respiratory inflammation not only significantly reduces your horse's performance but also its quality of life. One of the worst-case scenarios is severe breathing difficulties, even during rest periods.
What Can Horse Owners Do to Best Support Their Horses' Respiratory Issues?
The answer always lies in tailored bedding and feeding management.
Since the domestication of horses, they have relied on humans. While wild horses roamed the steppes in herds, grazing on various plant materials, today's domesticated horses are often kept in open, paddock, or box stalls, standing on bedding selected by us and eating roughage provided by humans. This housing and feeding arrangement exposes horses to significantly more dust. It's up to the horse owner to keep the horse healthy. This also includes creating as dust-free an environment as possible for the horses.
However, here lies the problem. Since horses are "continuous feeders," ideally spending over 15 hours a day eating, their noses are constantly in dusty bedding and even dustier roughage.
Hay as Traditional Roughage
In our latitudes, it's not possible to provide horses with a vegetation-free winter and thus annual pasture feeding. Instead, humans must continue to ensure that horses are provided with enough roughage. This is done by preserving grass as the basic feed.
The most traditional method for this is haymaking.
However, hay is the primary factor in the development of inflammatory processes in the airways. It is produced through the drying process. As a by-product of inadequate drying, a variety of mites, bacteria, and molds accumulate. Dust is also considered another typical problem with this preservative.
It has long been known that even hygienically high-quality hay contains a high level of potentially harmful microbes due to the preservation process (Vandenput et al., 1997). The most common problem for horse owners is respiratory tract disease (Holmquist et al., 2002). A study by C.E. Müller shows that the vast majority of horse owners have negative experiences with feeding hay to the respiratory tract. This is also underscored by an analysis by Von Clausen et al. This study demonstrated in 2004 that the second most common reason for euthanizing horses is respiratory diseases.
Haylage as Alternatives to Traditional Hay?
In theory, haylage, as a less dusty and microbe-rich roughage, is an alternative to conventional hay. Unfortunately, in practice, the opposite is often the case.
Due to inadequate silage or procedural errors, haylage can contain microorganisms such as clostridia, enterobacteria, and listerine. These cause anaerobic spoilage of the haylage. This, in turn, triggers aerobic spoilage by organisms such as molds and yeasts. The fermentation products and acidity in the layers can also lead to serious illnesses. Furthermore, there is a risk of botulism. This is a life-threatening poisoning caused by small animals in the preserved bales.
Gastrointestinal diseases such as colic or free-flowing diarrhea are often associated with feeding haylage. Studies such as those by M.J.S. Moore-Colyer and A.C. Longland demonstrate horse owners' fear of feeding haylage, as the clear majority can report negative experiences with feeding this roughage.
Other Supposed Alternatives on the Path to Hygienic Roughage
Many horse owners, and now even entire stable operators, use watering hay to protect horses from the dust contained in the hay.
Primarily, this method aims to bind the dust in the hay so that it no longer enters the horses' airways. Watering is effective in binding the dust, but it also washes out the nutrients contained in the hay, as well as causing a significant increase in microbe growth. An increased burden of bacteria, yeasts, molds, etc., is not conducive, as these also pose health risks, such as diarrhea, reduced lung function, liver stress, etc.
How Does Inhaling and Feeding Supplements Help with Respiratory Problems?
Every horse owner dreads the diagnosis of COPD, RAO, IAD. But what do you do if it's diagnosed by the vet?
Many horse owners turn to old familiar methods such as inhalation, medications, or supplements. These work partially and to some extent but cannot address the problem at its root.
It's essential to address the root cause and not just treat the symptoms!
So how can we effectively maintain high-quality, hygienic roughage while also binding breathable dust and killing harmful microorganisms?
The answer is unconventional and unfortunately not as widespread as the watering method: hay steaming!
Scientific studies conducted by renowned researchers in this field, such as Moore-Colyer, James, Stockdale, Leggatt, and many others, have shown that steaming hay completely eliminates yeasts and molds, such as the health-threatening fungus Aspergillus. Additionally, bacteria are also killed by the hot steam, reducing the lung-passable dust by up to 94% through this method.
The concept of steaming hay makes sense. Similar to a steam cooker, the nutrients are preserved, with only the NSC (non-structural carbohydrates) value decreasing. However, sugars and starch are not necessarily desired constituents in hay, as they can trigger insulin disruptions. This imbalance in insulin production often leads to diseases such as Equine Metabolic Syndrome (EMS), laminitis, and Equine Polysaccharide Storage Myopathy (PSSM).
Steaming hay has proven itself not only in theory but also in practice for horses suffering from respiratory diseases. In summary, like watering, hay steaming offers high dust binding and eliminates harmful microbes. Furthermore, steaming hay can be successfully used to address gastrointestinal diseases caused by bacteria.
Even for horses that must avoid water-soluble carbohydrates (WSC) and non-structural carbohydrates (NSC) due to illness, steaming hay proves to be a suitable partner for daily roughage feeding.
Further Studies on This Topic:
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James, R. & Moore-Colyer, M.J.S. [2013] Hay for horses: The nutrient content of hay before and after steam treatment in a commercial hay steamer. Proceedings of British Society of Animal Science Conference, Nottingham April 2013.
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Von Clausen, M., Preisinger,R. & Kalm, E. [2004]. Analysis of disease data in German warmblood breeding. Breeding science 62, S. 167-178.
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Holmquist, S. & Müller, C.E. [2002]. Problems related to feeding forages to horses. Proceedings of the XIIIth International Silage Conference, S. 152-153.
Author:
Dana Böhnke [2018]: "The Influence of Forage Quality and Preservation Method on Feed Intake and Acceptance in Horses".
