Question
My 16-year-old American Saddlebred mare gets tender hooves whenever the season changes—from warm to cold in the fall, from cold to warm in the spring. She is overweight, as in “chubby plus.” Aside from pasture or hay, depending on season, her current diet includes 1.5 lb (0.7 kg) of hay pellets, stabilized rice bran, digestive aid, kelp, flaxseed, and vegetable oil. She lives in a herd outside (pasture in warm weather; round-baled grass hay in cold weather) and is fed her pellets and supplements twice a day. I trail ride her twice weekly, light riding on a weekday and more strenuous riding another day on the weekend. What could be causing the tender hooves?
Answer
While the current diet contributes several nutrients, it lacks important vitamins and minerals in sufficient quantities for optimal health. Using a high-quality vitamin and mineral supplement or ration balancer is one way to rectify this imbalance.
While you didn’t mention the reason for feeding vegetable oil, I suggest simplifying the current diet by replacing both the vegetable oil and flaxseed with EO-3, a marine-derived oil rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Flaxseed delivers alpha‐linolenic acid (ALA), an omega-3 fatty acid that must be converted into docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) to be beneficial to horses. However, this conversion is not efficient in horses. Unlike flaxseed, EO-3 is a direct source of DHA and EPA, which makes those omega-3s more available to horses. Omega-3s benefit horses through their anti-inflammatory and immune-boosting effects.
Based on the timing of her sore feet, she may be experiencing subclinical laminitic changes. Some laminitis-prone horses show seasonal changes in spring and fall. I suggest working closely with your veterinarian and farrier to determine if she has other signs of laminitis or if another issue could be causing her soreness.
Because your mare has access to pasture for much of the year, the use of a grazing muzzle is warranted to limit the consumption of grass and the intake of rapidly fermentable nonstructural carbohydrates. Using a drylot is another way to reduce intake. Both of these strategies will help her lose weight, as the goal should be to move her closer to moderate body condition (a score of 5 on a scale of 1 to 9). Not only will this be better for her soundness, but it will improve her general health, potentially staving off metabolic problems.
If you need to introduce hay to her diet to replace fresh grass, it would be ideal to find hay with a low level of nonstructural carbohydrates (less than 12%). Sending a hay sample to a reputable forage-testing laboratory, such as Equi-Analytical, will provide you with nutritional information required to make an appropriate forage choice. While pasture provides sufficient vitamin E to horses, preserved forages do not, so consider supplementing with a natural-source vitamin E such as Nano-E when feeding primarily hay.
