Tack Box Talk
Tack Box Talk
Feeding Myths: The stories of not always believing what you hear.
Dr. Nettie Liburt, of Liburt Equine Nutritional Consulting, shares her top misunderstanding that are frequently heard in the horse world. From what makes horses hot, to can you actually blow up your horse, we have a fun chat on what the data really tells us.
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Kris Hiney: welcome to extension horse's tack box talk series horse stories with a purpose. I'm your host, Dr. Kris Hiney, with Oklahoma State University, and today's topic is going to be visiting some common feeding myths. And oh, boy, are there a bunch of them out there in the horse world?
Kris Hiney: and to tackle our feeding myths is a returning guest, Dr. Neddy Lieburt, of equine nutritional consulting. So welcome back to the program, Nettie. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. We always have good stories to talk about, I know. So this one is like all of the the crazy stuff that people have heard or like historical, handed down over the years that turns out may not be a hundred percent true. So what is our top myth to kick us off?
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alright? So the because where you and I are right now it's
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Nettie Liburt: cold, to say the least. I want. The first myth I want to talk about is bran mashes. because I'm sure you've been in a bar, and I've been in barns where they say, oh, every Sunday evening we're gonna feed a warm bran mash to the horses to help clean them out.
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Nettie Liburt: That is a myth.
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Kris Hiney: That is absolutely. It doesn't work that way. So sometimes when people do that and they feed their warm bran mash on Sunday evening, and all the horses have loose stools.
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Nettie Liburt: Why do they have loose stools then? Well, because they're not used to having the bran and their diet, and if you dump a bunch of it in front of them, and they're not used to it. That's
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Nettie Liburt: probably more likely the reason. Because Bran actually doesn't have the laxative effect that you think it does like. But the horse would have to eat more bran than he could physically consume in order to have a laxative effect. So
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Nettie Liburt: yeah, unfortunately, it it doesn't quite work that way. But you can feed Bran if you want to just make it part of a balanced regular diet, and you know that's fine horses like it. If you need to hide medication or get water into them somehow, you know, that's what I was gonna ask, like, I thought a lot of people did it in the in the winter to try to encourage some water intake. So they kinda make this soupy slurry that horses think are tasty cause. Otherwise they're like, icy water. Yuck.
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Nettie Liburt: yeah, no, that you can absolutely do. You can absolutely do that anything we know. To get water into them is a good thing. It's just when
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Nettie Liburt: II cause I've seen Barns do this like once a week. Everybody gets a bran mash like that's the thing that we want to stay away from. It's either
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Nettie Liburt: consistently or not at all. So so one idea, then it cause it's cold right now that you could take if they would eat it. So let me throw this caveat. Some horses will be like, what did you just do to my food? But like it, you could add and make a warm mash out of their regular feed. Right? Yeah.
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Nettie Liburt: you can soak anything you want to. Sometimes people have asked me, is it okay to put water on this? Absolutely. You can soak whatever you want. Some horses are fussy about just like you said. Some horses are fussy about not wanting to eat soaked stuff, but
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Nettie Liburt: most of them and most of them aren't, and if it's their regular feed, and you want to put some warm water in it, by all means just make sure they eat it, because if they don't, and it becomes a frozen mess, that's yeah. You know, ages ago, in another life, we actually did a fun little project where we did some feeding horses
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Nettie Liburt: mash like putting water on their food and then monitoring water intake, because we thought well, if they got it in their water that they would, or get it in their feed, they would drink less water, but that was not true. It actually did bump up water, intake a little bit. By doing that. So
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Nettie Liburt: yay, yay, I learned something today every time. Always good to chat. It's always good to have these chats. It is alright! What's myth? Number 2,
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Nettie Liburt: myth number 2? There's so many to choose from. And just when you think you've heard them all, you have not. Alright. Myth number 2 is about protein.
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Nettie Liburt: What about it? Exactly.
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Nettie Liburt: I hear this one from veterinarians.
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Nettie Liburt: I hear this one from horse owners, and if I could stand on top of the Empire State Building and scream out, no, no, no, I would, except, I'm afraid of heights
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Nettie Liburt: protein very often gets the blame for things like
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Nettie Liburt: rapid growth, or growing too fast, causes of developmental orthopedic disease, making horses excitable, or hyper or spooky all of those things, and it is not the protein that does that.
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Kris Hiney: Okay? So protein does not make horses hot
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Nettie Liburt: doesn't make them hot doesn't cause developmental orthopedic disease. Doesn't make them spooky. If we're talking developmental orthopedic disease, which I know technically, we're not. The causes of that are more likely, too much overall energy, too many calories. It could be genetics. It could be imbalances of minerals, but it is not protein, it is not protein, and when
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Nettie Liburt: horses are spooky or flighty or hot.
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Nettie Liburt: Why are they hot? Are they getting enough turnout? Are they being exercised enough, you know, are, are they? Is? Is that just their personality? So you know, there's some of those other factors to consider, too. But it isn't the protein we used to think it was. But research studies have shown repeatedly that it is not
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the protein.
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Kris Hiney: Okay, what? Here? I'm gonna throw out another protein thought. Then. So a lot of people, probably this is just human nature, too, like you wanna eat the protein to get the gains right, and either for muscle or weight, that people reach to high protein for that.
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Nettie Liburt: So this is a this is such a good question for Dr. Kristine Urschel, at Kentucky, because this is what she does. So yes, protein is essential for every single thing that your body does so you must have an appropriate amount of protein, and that includes
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Nettie Liburt: muscle synthesis and they've looked at, you know, so protein is made up of amino acids right, amino acids are like the letters of an alphabet and proteins, or the words. So you can combine those amino acids a million different ways, as you know, to make all kinds of different proteins. So they've experimented with taking some of those individual amino acids that the horse can't make himself
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Nettie Liburt: and fed them and said, Hey, can we stimulate muscle growth just by feeding a whole bunch of Lysine and they haven't had a lot of success with it.
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Nettie Liburt: But of course, without proper protein and protein balance and all of these essential amino acids you're you're not gonna get. You're not gonna get any of that muscle protein. You do need a proper balance of amino acids. Really, horses have an amino acid requirement. We're just
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Nettie Liburt: still trying to nail that down in our world. But yeah, they do need balanced protein for muscle synthesis. But it seems if you feed excess protein, it doesn't necessarily cause them to gain more muscle.
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Kris Hiney: right? So because I always say that would be the equivalent of you just eating a bunch of meat and like I don't have to go to the gym
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Kris Hiney: magically.
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Nettie Liburt: I don't know why they do that, but that's a whole another topic. So okay, so that was protein alright number 3.
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Nettie Liburt: Next 1. One of my favorite things is beet pulp. We're gonna talk something this about beep pulp. Okay?
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Nettie Liburt: So the myth
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Nettie Liburt: is that if you feed, beat pulp shreds dry, they will expand, or cause your horse to choke or cause their stomach to rupture. Blow them up, blow them up right? Yes, and that is actually not true.
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Nettie Liburt: Now, I never recommend that you feed, beet, pulp dry for a lot of reasons that typically isn't one of them. But saliva isn't absorbed into the beet pulp fast enough for it to expand in the esophagus and cause choke. Now, because it's those small light particles.
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Nettie Liburt: If your horse eats really fast, and you know, if you've ever taken like a teaspoon full of, you know, wheat germ, or something that's has that like powdery stuff, and then you breathe in and you cough the kind of the same thing. So if there's small particle size, so you do have a greater risk of choke in horses that bolt their feet, or if they don't chew it properly,
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Nettie Liburt: but a horse's stomach can hold an adult 1,100 pound horse about 2 to 4 gallons, roughly depending on how big they are.
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Nettie Liburt: and a quart of dry beet pulp shreds weighs about a half a pound. So if you were concerned about having their stomach
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Nettie Liburt: expand or bloat from beet pulp, you would be feeding somewhere between 4 and 9 pounds of dried beet pulp, which you should never be doing. And if you are, then, you know, please call us because we need to talk so. Most people are not feeding that much
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Nettie Liburt: beet pulp, so the pellets, on the other hand, like you can buy, beet, pulp, and shreds you can buy in pellets. You should always soak the pellets, and again. I always recommend that you soak the shreds, even though again, they're not gonna swell up the instant your horse puts them in their mouth and cause them to choke. It's just another good way to get water into your horse, by the way. Just soak up, but just on its own. It's not gonna swell up and cause your horse to expand.
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Kris Hiney: Okay, alright. So no blowing up. Horses were safe. Right? Okay? Alright. What's our next one?
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Nettie Liburt: Okay. this one's a little bit of a can of worms.
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Nettie Liburt: it's well, alright, we'll we'll just go there. Supplements. Okay, so true or false. Dr. Hiney, you're ready. Yes.
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Nettie Liburt: if some supplements are good, more must be better. I think that's a false statement. Now, the word obviously supplements that could mean a whole lot of things. It could be vitamin mineral supplements. It could be joint supplements, it could be hoof supplements, it could be whatever fill in the blank.
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Nettie Liburt: but you can, and supplements have their place, absolutely they do. But you can do too much of a good thing, and more is not always better. So, for example, if you're feeding a vitamin and mineral supplements. And you think, oh, jeez well, my horse looks so great I'm gonna add some more. Well, you wanna be careful with that, because then you can throw the mineral balances.
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Nettie Liburt: vitamin and mineral balances off, and you can end up feeding certain vitamins and minerals can actually be toxic. So you don't wanna over feed, for example, vitamin a or selenium which can be fatal. So you want to be really careful about that. So more is not always
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Nettie Liburt: better. Now again, a million different classes of supplements. But just in general.
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Kris Hiney: Yeah, we did that whole series with, Doctor Williams, did we? I think it was a 4 part or something that we talked about supplements and kind of evaluating whether they're good or not. So, or here's a true or false for you. Oh, okay, true or false. Good horse owners feed supplements.
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Kris Hiney: I'm gonna say that's false with an asterisk, because doesn't make you a bad horse owner, if you're not feeding supplements. There you go. Nor does just the presence of supplements. I mean, you're a good horse owner. Exactly. That would be one of those test questions that the students would be like, I hate you. So can I please explain my answer? Yeah, yeah, that's what they do. And even if there was no space to explain an answer, I totally would cause.
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Nettie Liburt: yeah, that's how I roll. Yeah. Now.
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Nettie Liburt: you know, as you know, Doctor Williams, I'm sure, has gotten into this cause. I know this is a topic near and dear to her heart.
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Nettie Liburt: There's no official regulation on supplements, so I can tell you. My jar of magic Pixie dust is going to support your horses, joints, and muscle development, but it might just be a bunch of flour in there. And you know, that's kind of legal. So it's buyer. Beware! You want to buy from
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Nettie Liburt: reputable producers. You can look for the National Animal Supplement Council Seal, which at least means that what the manufacturer says is in the jar is actually in the jar. It doesn't guarantee efficacy, but at least you're getting what they say. You're getting what’s on the label. So we do what we can.
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Kris Hiney: Yeah, which
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Nettie Liburt: turns out it's not much. Oh, well, alright! What else? We have? Okay. So another, true or false, for you. And again, we could do
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Nettie Liburt: an hour on just this topic. But
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so true or false.
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Nettie Liburt: starch and carbohydrates are bad for the horse.
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Kris Hiney: Okay, I'm gonna so I will always say false on carbohydrates.
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Nettie Liburt: But starch that has limits. So I'm gonna put a qualification in my true false blank. I can't yell at you for doing that. Generally the answer is false. Yes, absolutely. You are correct that some horses do have
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Nettie Liburt: limitations on what they can take in to their diet. If they have metabolic concerns, or they have a history of laminitis. Of course we're going to limit those in the diet, but in general your body cannot function without carbohydrates. So you do the brain, for example.
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Nettie Liburt: the preferred fuel for the brain, and this includes, you know, we as humans and our horses as horses, prefers carbohydrates as a fuel source.
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So carbs are not bad. Yes, sometimes we have to limit them, and horses evolved eating
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Nettie Liburt: those little meals all day long. And carbs are also important for red blood cell formation. So those are important, for you know, carrying oxygen around
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and glucose.
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Nettie Liburt: which is a simple sugar, which is a carbohydrate, is the main carbohydrate used for ATP. So, listeners, you remember that from biology class that's your energy production, right? Adenosine triphosphate.
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Nettie Liburt: now, if you have too much, what's gonna happen. It gets stored in your muscle and your liver in the form of glycogen
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Nettie Liburt: and then the next time you do exercise or run away from something that's trying to eat you as you know, horses once had to do.
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Nettie Liburt: Then you have those stores, so you have ready energy to.
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Nettie Liburt: you know, burst out, Run away, and then they get replenished as part of exercise recovery.
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Nettie Liburt: But again, if they, if you have too much at one time, that's when we can get digestive upset, we worry about laminitis, and then over time obesity, because once those muscle and liver stores are full because they can only hold so much. If you still have more carbs coming in, they're going to get stored as fat.
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Nettie Liburt: So again, that is not bad. We do need some, but we don't want too much.
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Kris Hiney: Okay.
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Kris Hiney: so but again, for our metabolically challenged individuals, those are the folks you have to keep. Keep an eye on. Oh, and our PSSM. Horses them, too. Oh, yeah, I owned one. It was a fun time so.
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Kris Hiney: But I always like to be the person that drives people nuts, though. And I'm like, okay. So the bulk of your horses diet is carbohydrates. Without a doubt a hundred percent cause we tell that to you all the time. But you gotta remember, fiber is a carbohydrate. That's an important thing. Fiber.
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Nettie Liburt: Oh, yes, of course it is, but that's the kind of fiber that the microbes go to work on so like it, so we like it on it
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alright. Next myth.
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Nettie Liburt: All right. I think I got 2 more for you the next one. Do you remember? Have you ever come across anyone? And this is sort of an old school one. you know the expression. He's feeling his oats.
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Nettie Liburt: Yes, my horse is feeling his. Those. So
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Nettie Liburt: people way back in the day, way back, probably before our time, too, and even to some degree now, but less so in my experience.
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Nettie Liburt: People used to feed scoops of oats to horses and other grains.
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Nettie Liburt: corn, which has to be processed in some way cracked like something or even barley.
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Nettie Liburt: Those are the 3 most common ones. And yep, that's all they need corn. They just need straight grains. They don't need anything else, and that's what they need, true or false.
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Nettie Liburt: Well, I was gonna say false. But I was still back on. The feeling his oats question.
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Nettie Liburt: Well, generally we lean towards false, because those things don't have enough. First of all, they don't have enough fiber. Horses still need forage in their diet.
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Nettie Liburt: But, more importantly, there. they don't have proper or sufficient vitamins and minerals in them. So all grains have a reversed calcium to phosphorus ratio, meaning that they have more phosphorus than they do calcium. And if you don't balance that in a horse's diet
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Nettie Liburt: you can have problems with bone metabolism even in an adult, horse, so they'll also be deficient, or they potentially could be deficient if they don't have pasture in things like vitamin e maybe even vitamin a cause. There's just not a lot of those things in straight grains, so you can feed straight grains to your horse. You just have to balance them with
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Nettie Liburt: ideally a ration balance or or something like that to kinda
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Nettie Liburt: cover. Cover your bases. But yeah, if all horses getting is a scoop of oats and some hay. They're probably missing some other nutrients in their diet.
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Kris Hiney: Well, and I think we'd have to consider how horses
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Kris Hiney: were housed and and things back in the day, right when when that that is what people did. They probably also had access to a lot more pasture and grazing than what we typically offer these days. Yes, and that's a good point, because fresh pasture does have a lot of those
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Nettie Liburt: vitamin E, and you know some of the other minerals that a horse needs so.
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Nettie Liburt: Yes, they were much more likely to be balanced way back then than they are.
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Nettie Liburt: you know. Now, if, if depending on where you live, you may have tons of pasture. You may be thinking, what are you talking about? But a lot of us don't. So right? Right? Yeah. So, okay. So the feeling there, Oats, that was.
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Nettie Liburt: I always pictured that with like a a horse that's really well fed and locked in a stall, and you let him out like is that where the saying came from, or where did it? Yes, so I just figured. I always imagine you know, if you've ever gotten on a horse, and you thought, Oh, boy.
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Nettie Liburt: I might die today because they're very. They're very up, or they're very full of energy maybe throw in a buck underneath you, or something like that. That's what I was. Got plenty of energy today. So that would be one of our feeding myths right? Because a lot of that is actually coming from horses that have not had the opportunity to
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Kris Hiney: do exercise or locomotion. And that's where we get a lot of that explosive, like a horse feeling hot or fresh is because
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Kris Hiney: well, they they've been cooped up, and so they like in a stall for 20 hours a day. Yeah, absolutely. So that was
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Nettie Liburt: are are they getting out? Are are they getting a chance to throw kick up their heels a little bit? They still do need to be horses, whether they're you know.
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Nettie Liburt: high level show horses, whether they're, you know, backyard pets. They still need the opportunity to roll in the dirt and
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Nettie Liburt: and have a good buck on their own, and then chances are they'll be a little more willing to cooperate you with you under saddle if they have that chance to do that.
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Kris Hiney: Yeah.
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Nettie Liburt: alright. So you said we got one more alright, got one more.
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Nettie Liburt: and it's about water. So I grew up with this one, too.
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Nettie Liburt: so I one of the things that we were always told is, you can't give a hot horse water gonna make them sick.
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Nettie Liburt: that's actually not true. So research has been done. And this is actually published in one of the equine exercise physiology texts by David Marlin and Kathern Ann Curvis
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Nettie Liburt: horses, if
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Nettie Liburt: now, imagine, if you will, that it's hot outside as right now, snowing outside my window.
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Nettie Liburt: but imagine that it's really hot and humid. and if your horse is working they can lose 2 to 4 gallons of sweat per hour.
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Nettie Liburt: That's a lot or 16 to 32 pounds of water. So a loss of 22 pounds of water
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Nettie Liburt: can affect their performance. And that's actually, roughly, 2% of their body mass. And now in people it's only about a 1% loss. But in horses it's a little higher. So there's actually no reason to withhold water from a hot horse. It doesn't cause colic. Now, what you don't wanna do is give them a big bucket of ice water.
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Nettie Liburt: because that that if you've ever done that, if you've ever drank a whole bunch of ice water when you're really hot, it's gonna make your stomach hurt a little bit, but tap cool water is fine. You don't need to make it ice water
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Nettie Liburt: so that you want them to take in water to help them sweat to help them regulate their body temperature, and it should be offered frequently, and you can offer them, you know, little bouts of it. Let them take 10 sips, give them a break for a minute to let them take 10 more sips, if that if that works for you. But you always want to make sure they have free, clean, fresh
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Kris Hiney: water. You know, if you're trailering, stop on the side of the road, I have one of the ones that will not drink on the horse trailer, he absolutely will not do it.
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Nettie Liburt: So that always worries me, and some are like that. But you should still offer it to them, even if you don't think they're gonna drink it so. And I think people we'll come back to that myth. But I just wanted to mention, like thermal regulation, and the horse's body temperature actually gives them feedback about drinking. And so, if you withhold right until that stimulus is gone, you might be in a little bit of a deficit, because
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Nettie Liburt: had the urge to drink like right? And sometimes that thirst response can be a little bit delayed. So
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Nettie Liburt: you wanna make sure that hopefully, you're not
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Nettie Liburt: dehydrated by the time you drink. Hopefully, you wanna drink before you get right to that point. Yeah. So that one that was like in the old children's books, right? So I think like, didn't. Didn't Black beauty.
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Kris Hiney: yeah. Didn't they fire the groom because
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Nettie Liburt: they gave Black Beauty some water or something, or his friend. I think that's in there. I haven't seen that or read that in so many years. I don't remember, but it's entirely possible. But yeah, I mean, that's I grew up learning that we grew up, you know, talking about that in 4 H. And make sure they're all cooled out before you give them water. But again, just the real. The only thing you really want to avoid is ice water. Now you can put the ice water on the horse, but you don't want them to drink you. You wouldn't
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Nettie Liburt: just have them drink ice water just right out of the tap, like we used to do back in the day. GenX, drink it right out of the host. That's fine, that's fine. So II have a funny little story. When I was I I think it was seventh grade. So hear me. And remembering back a lot of great school years ago. But I always remember these little moments we were reading a book right? And so for English class like it. They had vocabulary words that you had to learn and stuff like that.
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Kris Hiney: And so one of the words was founder. And so the teacher taught us. It was something like a ship going down, or something like this. And so in the context, it was about a a horse, and it was crossing a creek, and they're like, Oh, don't let him
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Kris Hiney: stop to drink, because he will founder, and I was like, teacher, you are so wrong. That is not what they're talking about. That was like, it's a horse disorder. It's not a ship sinking, but it was the funniest thing ever cause they. I guess they thought it'd be like, oh, the horse would like
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Kris Hiney: founder like a ship going down.
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Nettie Liburt: But so I have a similar story about a bridle path. And he said, Oh, what's a bridle path? I'm like, oh, it's behind the horse's ears where you just clip a little bit of the mane so the bridle can sit, or the halter can sit there comfortably, and they're like
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Nettie Liburt: no, it's where the bride walks
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Kris Hiney: not in my world. That's funny. So yes, use appropriate equine terminology at all times, I know. So alright. Are we missing any fun myths? So maybe we should have like a write in campaign.
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Nettie Liburt: I'm telling you, just when you think you have heard them all you have not, and someone will come up with one. So I would love if anybody comments or emails you about more feed, miss, that they've heard, or things they think might be true, but aren't sure. But, these are just some of the common ones that I hear, especially the the protein one commonly. Still, to this day people are blaming protein for all kinds of things. They
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Kris Hiney: shouldn't be blaming protein for. Yeah. Yeah. And remember, people, everything you read on the Internet isn't isn't true. Oh, boy, no, be careful. Even if the
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Kris Hiney: Group leader has 20,000 followers, it doesn't always mean they know what they're talking about. Yeah, what I had a funny one. So somebody had asked me like a genetics question about just coat color inheritance. So it's like, Okay, that's pretty easy one. I'm I'm not a coat color expert. Uc. Davis, so don't get crazy. But it would. They had asked me about if a perlino that they had heard of Perlino could not pass on being a perlino
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Kris Hiney: to his offspring.
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Kris Hiney: and I was like, where did you hear that? That depends on what you breed it to. Yes, there are certain combinations that you can't get that. But you breed it to the right horse, you sure can. It's just here's a cream gene. There's a funny one I had to. So
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Nettie Liburt: I have a well, I have a gross food one. It's not really a myth. It's just gross.
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Kris Hiney: Somebody say, Yeah, I got this horse, and they used to feed him, used restaurant oil.
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Nettie Liburt: and I said, Don't do that, do not do that.
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Kris Hiney: No, he said, no, no, I don't. But they said, That's what they do, and they feed him oil, and they pick it up for free at the restaurant. I'm like, Okay, it is free, just please. He's like, No, no, it's like.
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Kris Hiney: yeah, that's a good one. That's so on that note. Ha! I hope you're not eating lunch, because that one was cool. Yeah, no, no floating vat of goo. So
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Kris Hiney: well, I definitely appreciate you kinda hanging out with us today, though, and we'll have to collect up some more of our fun stories and like, share them back on the the crazy questions that people ask us. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me again. It's always fun to to come and chat. Yeah.
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Kris Hiney: yeah, I love our horse nutrition chats. Oh, yeah, we've always got stories to tell. Do well appreciate it again, and if you're looking for other information about feeding horses, you can always visit us at extension horses.com listen to our other episodes or even reach out to Dr. Liburt for some nutritional advice.
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So this has been another episode of our Tack Box Talk Horse stories with a purpose.