Your horse's digestive system is meant to handle frequent, small meals because they are grazers. Wild horses have constant access to natural forage that is fibrous and easily digested. Due to this, horses in the wild rarely experience digestive issues that are common in their domesticated relatives.
Ensuring the health and wellness of your equine is a top priority. A horse’s digestive system is essential to overall health but often goes unnoticed. Generally, emphasis is placed on the horse's external appearance, making it easy to overlook subtle symptoms until they become more pronounced.
The key to keeping your horse's digestive system healthy is understanding how it works and how the equine GI tract differs from yours. Horses are grazing animals with a digestive tract designed for near-constant eating of small portions, mainly hay and grass. They have small stomachs compared to their body size and are "hindgut fermenters," meaning the bulk of their digestive process occurs in the large intestine. Human digestion happens mainly in the small intestine (foregut fermenters) and can easily manage bigger meal portions and less frequent feedings.
As beautiful and graceful as horses appear, they are also accident-prone, primarily due to their long legs. Despite their large stature and incredible strength, they seem to find foreign objects to cut or puncture themselves on, no matter how well you inspect their stall or turnout area for hidden hazards. Fencing, gates, trailers, stable materials and other horses often cause injuries. Knowing how to care correctly for your horse’s cuts and scrapes includes identifying when infection begins.
Once you become a horse owner, you quickly learn that wound care is essential to caring for your equine companion. Horses tend to get cuts and scrapes no matter how carefully you've checked over their living spaces. Pasture mates sometimes bite or kick each other, leaving behind evidence of a well-placed message. Regardless of how the wound occurred, knowing how to care for them yourself quickly and effectively helps avoid infections and complications.
