The First Step- Keeping the Ridden Horse Barefoot

The first step to keeping your ridden horse barefoot, successfully, at a high level of performance, has nothing to do with taking the shoes off. If transitioning to barefoot from shoes, the first step is to clean up the diet. If your horse is not performing as well as he could barefoot, the first step should be to go back and examine the diet. Success in barefoot performance or barefoot rehabilitation is determined by four factors; Diet, Environment, Exercise and Trim. Those well meaning naysayers who fail at the barefoot experiment have invariably just taken the horse’s shoes off and expected instant success, without taking the first step and making husbandry and lifestyle changes.

Now please note, I have no formal nutritional qualifications. I am a human doctor, specialising in colorectal surgery, and my MD research thesis was on inflammation and sepsis. Through my day job, I understand and fix the human digestive system, and I know a huge amount about inflammation and the human animal, but the most useful thing about becoming a “Doctor Doctor Miss Miss” (MBChB, MD, MRCS, FRCS)  is that I have learned how to read other people’s research, evaluate the evidence and then critically test apparently good theory on my own horses. What follows is therefore my opinion, and  current learning, from 25 years of full-time human doctoring and professional polo grooming around the world as well as amateur horse keeping.

Forage Based Diet

The first step is that the horse’s diet should be mainly forage based. They are trickle feeders; in the wild they will browse, forage and graze for 16 hours a day. A forage base diet doesn’t mean they should be standing in a lush green paddock of rye grass, stuffing their faces, or being surrounded by free choice ad lib rye based hay.

Trickle feeding a forage based diet means they should have to work quite for their forage but it also that it should be available more or less non stop. Unless you are going to drive around the field all day with them dispensing wedges of different forage at regular intervals, this means for true species specific husbandry we have to get creative. Track systems encourage natural movement. But the grass on track systems tend to get stressed, so they must have free access to other stuff, hay or haylage, trees and natural hedgerows, with a variety of weeds, and herbs.

Cal, my grey horse, has had breathing problems in the past, so I feed organic, late cut,meadow “Haylage” that is more like wrapped hay. It has to be organic, I found that out the hard way. Fertilised forage causes all sorts of strange toxic effects

https://forageplus.co.uk/nitrate-toxicity-in-horse-hay-haylage/

Feed Clean

When we first moved to our new field, we bought gorgeous looking meadow hay off the farmer next door. It smelt lovely, tested OK for sugar and starch, and was available in the right quantity at the right price. But the horses just didn’t look quite right on it. We switched to organic and they bloomed.

I also believe everything we should feed horses should be non GMO. Not because genetic modification doesn’t occur every time we breed an animal, or cultivate a plant, but because humans have mostly used GMO technology to increase plants’ resistance to chemicals so we can then use ever more toxic chemicals on the crop to increase yield. So organic, nitrate free, glyphosate free and GMO are unlikely to occur in the same space.

Round up is the commonest glyphosate: 

“Glyphosate is an herbicide. It is applied to the leaves of plants to kill both broadleaf plants and grasses. The sodium salt form of glyphosate is used to regulate plant growth and ripen fruit. Glyphosate was first registered for use in the U.S. in 1974.”

Glyphosate is used as a desiccant; if it is applied to wheat just before harvest, the wheat dies by going to seed, thereby increasing the yield from the harvest.

https://prepareforchange.net/2018/10/23/bayer-stock-crashes-after-monsanto-cancer-verdict-upheld-by-judge-analyst-estimates-800-billion-in-future-liability/

Would you knowingly eat cereal that had been sprayed with poisonous weedkiller just before it was harvested? Would you like your horse to?

Speaking of Grass

The rest of the barefoot horse’s diet, once you get your forage right, is relatively easy. They shouldn’t need much else. If your forage is good quality and they have good varied grazing with access to a variety of herbs and weeds, they shouldn’t need much else.

I say that with my tongue in my cheek. Rewilding is a relatively new name for an ancient concept- living in harmony and balance with nature. The story of Knepp is the recent high profile example of this concept in action.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/28/wilding-isabella-tree-review-farm-return-nature

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/veganism-intensively-farmed-meat-dairy-soya-maize

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/15/the-magical-wilderness-farm-raising-cows-among-the-weeds-at-knepp

It took 3 years of hard work to get my supposedly horse friendly grass field in Cheshire up to a paltry 8 species per m2… more of that story in these two posts

Albrecht and the agronomist

How much grass do horses need?

Remember that our main crop is horses, not grass. If your field, like most of Cheshire, has only one or two plant species per m2, then you may need to supplement vitamins and minerals. The carrier feed for the supplement should be organic, non GMO, low sugar, and low starch. I would suggest feeding straights, then you know exactly what you are feeding. If you must feed processed feed in nice shiny bags, then be sure to avoid anything that contains  oatmeal or wheatmeal (industrial floor sweepings), soya oil or meal, (the balance or omega 3,6,9 is completely wrong and actually predisposes to inflammation, and molasses flavouring.

Good brands of feed that I have used include Agrobs, St Hippolyt, Simple Systems. 

Read your labels. And don’t believe marketing ploys like the Laminitis Trust badge or friendly sounding names like healthy hooves: read the labels again and do your own research.

Avoid overfeeding. Fat predisposes to insulin resistance, and also has a pro-inflammatory effect on the body. In humans, obesity is a strong independent predictor for cancer, diabetes and heart problems, because fat itself excretes damaging inflammatory signalling chemicals called cytokines. 

Vitamins and Minerals

In terms of the mineral supplement content, magnesium oxide is really useful in the early transition days. Magnesium is deficient in most Western soils and diets. Horses and humans all very rarely test deficient in magnesium because levels are so tightly regulated in the blood and serum, but supplementing it has been shown anecdotally to have positive effects, for health and well being, as well as for barefoot transition. Magnesium also has an analgesic (painkilling) effect, helping horses to use their hooves better in the early stages.

Salt is crucial,

https://www.gravelproofhoof.org/salt

as are copper and zinc, to balance out the iron in our soils. I feed a 25ml scoop of table salt every day, and more in summer if they are working hard. If you can buy sea salt by the 25kg bag that’s probably better for them, but I’ve chosen ease over quality here. 

There are many good all round balancers on the market to ease transition. I would only go with a British barefoot brand; these people have done their homework, their horses have travelled the miles, and they have developed a product based on the needs of the barefoot equine that they have identified from their own experience. A barefoot horse will tell you categorically if the husbandry is good enough, by developing rock crunching high mileage hooves.

So there you have it; the first step to taking the ridden horse barefoot is to forensically examine and perhaps change what you feed. Good hard working feet rely on good clean healthy nutrition, and it’s important to set yourself up for success with this crucial first step.