The health of the hooves will affect the overall health of your horse. The best way to enhance the health of your horse’s hooves is to make sure to properly feed your horse with a complete yet balanced nutritional ration. The feed program will vary from fast growing foals, performance horse to old horses.
Poor quality hooves have horns that show poor structural integrity. Hooves having poor quality horns will have a slow growth rate. To effectively create the proper feeding program, below is a view of the basic essential hoof nutrients as well as the potential outcome of hoof nutritional excess and deficiency.
The Importance of Nutritional Balance
One of the biggest problems in the horse health industry is feeding imbalanced rations. It is essential that all horses be fed with an accurately balanced ration. Each nutrient should be provided in the right amount depending on the category of the horse.
Imbalanced in diet can affect the strength and structure of a hoof. Focusing on just one nutrient will result to issues as various nutrients tend to have complex interactions.
While some horse owners acquire a well balanced commercial feed for their horse, they make the mistake of adding another feed component into it. The component added makes the feed imbalanced instead. Another mistake horse owners make is feeding several supplements or nutrients that are more than the recommended amount by the manufacturer.
It is important to know that majority of nutrients, especially minerals, interact with other minerals. Altering the quantity of one mineral can make another mineral or nutrient become deficient.
Energy
While energy is not a nutrient, all horses have an energy requirement. A major source of energy found in feeds is carbohydrates. For many years now, fat as energy nutrient, has become essential in horse nutritional rations.
Protein when given more than a horse’s required nutrients can be converted to energy. This practice is not recommended as aside from the cost, it can provide a negative effect in certain cases such as feeding performance horses with excess protein in summer.
Both pasture and hay forages can supply energy. Forages can even provide adequate energy to meet nutritional needs of idle horses, pleasure horses or horses ridden only occasionally. Top performance horses can benefit from highly fermentable fiber sources such as soybean hulls and beet pulp. Not feeding the horse with the right amount of energy will allow it to lose body condition as well as may result to it having poor quality hooves.
Feeding your horses with excess energy will also have a negative effect on your horse such as extra weight which in turn results to stress on legs and hooves. High grain diets and excessive energy feeds have been implicated with laminitis. Feeding young or growing horses with too much high energy feeds can also result to developmental orthopaedic disease or DOD.
Protein
A horse’s hoof wall has a high level protein. With all the water removed, the hoof wall may be more than 90% protein. This does not mean that if your horse has poor quality hooves, you need to feed it with high levels of protein. All horses need to be fed with the right and required amount of protein. This strictly means, not more and not less.
The hoof wall of a horse is made up of an insoluble protein called keratin. It is a structural protein that composes of sulphur with amino acids. Methionine and cysteine create the bi-sulphurus bonds between keratin molecules. Over feeding horses with methionine can result to crumbling hoof walls, intermittent lameness, sore feet and difficulty in keeping shoes.
The ratio of protein to energy is as important as other ratios like calcium to phosphorus. Young and growing horses should have 50 to 55 grams of protein per Megacalorie of energy. Mares in late pregnancy need to have 45 grams per Megacalorie of energy, while early lactating mares require 50 grams of protein per Megacalorie of energy. For mature and idle horses, they require 40 grams of protein per Megacalorie of energy.
Feeding too much protein or too much energy of the ratio can be harmful. Horses that are fed with imbalanced protein to calorie ratio diet will eat lesser feeds, acquire lesser weight and have slower growth rate. In time, continuing with this diet can affect your horse’s hoof quality.
If you have a mature horse that has poor quality hooves, then feeding it additional protein is not the solution. Rather than feeding your horse more protein, feed it with higher quality protein. High Quality protein is where the right amino acids are in proper relation to one another. Sources for high quality protein includes alfalfa hay, soybean meal, casein milk by-products and others. Conversely, low quality protein is acquired from whey milk by-products, some grain by-products, and linseed and cottonseed meals.
Horses stressed in performance or transportation may require higher quality protein if the quality of their hooves diminishes.
Minerals
Minerals such as calcium, copper, magnesium, zinc and selenium are potential contributors to good hoof nutrition. While there are horses that have no response to biotin, calcium has a positive effect on their hooves quality. The ratio of calcium to phosphorus is highly important. Your horse’s diet need to contain more calcium than phosphorus. Feeds that are high in bran grain and low in forage is a diet that contains more phosphorus than calcium.
When fed in excess, phosphorus binds the calcium in the small intestine and alerts the body that it is calcium deficient. Calcium is a highly essential component in the integrity of the hoof’s wall. A 3:1 calcium to phosphorus ratio is sufficient in young and growing horses, while a 6:1 calcium to phosphorus ratio is good in mature horses.
Alfalfa contains high protein and calcium and can help poor quality hooves. Feeding your horse with alfalfa can improve horn growth and hoof quality. However, feeds with high levels of calcium can interfere with zinc absorption.
Trace minerals such as zinc, selenium, manganese and copper are key components of enzymes or co-factors that cause various body reactions to function right. Often, possessing too much of one of the specified trace minerals can be harmful. Zinc can help in providing healthy skin hair and hooves yet too much zinc can be in conflict with copper.
Copper is part of an enzyme that is needed in the build up of keratin’s disulfide bonds. Manganese is needed for chondroitin sulphate synthesis which is essentially helpful for joint cartilage’s formation, maintenance and repair. Adequate magnesium highly affects the development and maintenance of the skeletal matrix.
Utilizing chelated minerals shows to improve digestion of various minerals. Chelated minerals are the minerals attached to an amino acid. Feeding ½ the minerals in chelated form may improve health of hoof.
Vitamins
The vitamin that is highly acknowledged to improve hoof health is biotin, a B-vitamin. A research in England showed that horses with poor quality hooves have a positive response to biotin supplementation.
Vitamin A is also vital in the quality of a hoof. It can improve the integrity of the skin (dermis) and the hoof especially that it is an extension of the skin.
Water
It is a nutrient that is vital in proper growth and maintenance of your horse’s hoof. However, poor quality water may negatively affect the quality of the hoof.
You need to feed your horses with a well balanced nutrients ration to meet your horse nutritional requirements. The well-balanced ration will possess the right ratio of protein to energy and calcium to phosphorus, thus preventing deficiencies and excesses.
Horses that already have good quality hooves do not need special feeding supplements or program. However, if you spot that your horse’s hooves are becoming poor in quality or start to deteriorate then you may need to change nutrients ration.
