Most horses aren’t worked as hard as they once were, racehorses apart. For the most part we rely on feed companies to provide us with feed, the content of which we are blissfully ignorant of and veterinarians to magic away our health problems. That’s not always possible of course and we shouldn’t be surprised.
 

The horse left its natural environment only a few hundred years ago. We have replaced the natural environment with a very artificial one. In doing so we took over the responsibility of providing all the animals needs. We do this as best we can but though we have complete control do we have a complete understanding of the subject? Of course we do not.
 

Nature ruthlessly dealt with nutrition and health problems and in doing so fashioned a magnificent animal. Environment [ including diet, weather etc.,] impacted on genes and the horse found a way to survive and evolve.
 

Horses developed their superb mobility and athleticism by moving vast distances. They grazed over a very wide area and their diet was very varied. Different plants were taken from many different soil types. The nutritional content would have been as varied as the plant types. We cannot begin to manage the horses diet the way nature used to so what should we do when diet is so closely linked to health? We must keep it as broad based as possible to avoid narrow answers to complex problems. It must be wrong to go overboard about an element like selenium and then veer to another like biotin. - Both important but again it is doubtful whether anyone knows the right amounts to feed - because the requirements will vary so between differing animals and their differing work rates.
 

We must adopt a degree of humility in our approach to diet and health matters rather than taking fixed positions, or swaying with the latest fashion or thoughts of the feed or health industry. We are all learners when it comes to livestock and the natural sciences in general. Life sciences are dynamic.

The answers to horse health problems are not always easy to find because of the complex interrelationship of many different factors.

These factors include amongst other things different breeds of horse, different types within the breed, differing environments in the broadest sense of the word that these types are kept under, differing work rates, differing ages of horses, differing diets fed, challenged by diseases or ailments or not as the case may be, caused by pathogens that constantly present a challenge by their ability to mutate - i.e. viruses that appear to come as from nowhere and owners/carers are another variable factor to add to this far from complete list!
 

Horsemanship and experience or the lack of it can have a great impact, as we all know, on the well being of our animals. However for the experienced and inexperienced alike it can be very confusing to have nutritionists and feed companies with different approaches to feeding our animals. - A Dutch nutritionist for instance would talk to you about net energy in a feed- It is very unlikely that a British one would - And the net energy is so important. Its what's left for the horse to use when its liver and other digestive organs have overworked themselves to rid the body of the surplus proteins that are often in our proprietary brands of feed. This factor is so important because energy is one of the primary nutrients required by an animal to mobilise the bodies defence mechanisms to fight disease. With surplus degradable protein in the diet [this can occur on lush grass of course - i.e. Laminitis] we compromise the effective workings of the gut and the immune system sites located there. Most grazing of course is not too lush unless high levels of fertiliser has been used or unless the grass sward contains too much clover. Most horses however do not have access to good pasture. A lot of our grassland no longer contains a mixture of grass species and so nutritionally this sort of grass or the hay made from it is not a complete diet. We need to bear this in mind when we think of health and performance.
 

Feeding is the single most important factor when addressing horse health. - Not the vet or antibiotics, not genetics or the quality of stabling. If an animal is receiving all its dietary requirements for the situation it finds itself in and stress levels are not too high it will bye and large remain healthy. This is the clever bit - feeding for type, work rate and general environment. It is too clever for most of us to get right for most of the time so we must keep things simple, where possible, and pay attention to the basic principles.
 

The horse is a monogastric. It has a simple digestive tract. It requires roughage of good quality - not ‘straw’ or low dry matter silage. The ‘nuts’ we buy in a bag are largely a mystery to most horse owners. Do not buy on protein content alone. Don’t presume that as it is sold as a complete diet that it will have all the micronutrients that your horse or pony needs. To repeat - the nutritionist does not know - nobody knows! We are all still learners.
 

Our Approach

Clover Leafs Principals have an involvement with livestock that spans forty years. Our experience is across all the farmed species, horses and pets. The principles of health care, with all our animals, is the same. It is true to say that nutritionists and veterinarians made great advances in the last few decades in the areas of animal nutrition and health but we at Clover Leaf are concerned that there is not the connection between these areas that there might be. With farmed animals for instance -say the dairy industry, one can see ill health in high yielding cows and the cow receiving antibiotics when really it is blindingly obvious that the cow is not receiving the nutrients required for the amount of milk she’s producing! She loses too much weight, bodily reserves are depleted and she becomes susceptible to all the diseases present in the herd. Horses and ponies are the same. They may or may not be working as hard as the high yielding cow but their diet may be so lacking in some of the micronutrients, not to say macronutrients, that they become ill.
They may show acute symptoms or they may be chronically unthrifty which may lead to disease and shortened lives. At best this situation leads to high vet bills!

Clover Leaf does not claim to have ‘ magic wand’ products that prevent all disease and disease challenges but because disease challenge is a constant fact of life Clover Leaf have developed products that support the natural resistance of the horse. All our efforts should be to enable the horse ‘s immune system to deal with the challenge by itself, as indeed it did over the aeons of time that nature was producing the horse we have today. The products we recommend are detailed below but an example to illustrate the point is Clover Leaf’s Endoworm. It supports the immune system expelling worms in a natural way. There are no chemical or toxic actives!

In all the products we produce we use plant extracts and other natural compounds. On the nutritional side we use a feed additive which includes a wide spectrum of plant material which carries many nutritional compounds and thus provides a safety net which underscores poor diets and which helps to mitigate the worst effects of diets which are too ‘good’. More is written later on this dietary product called Canidex.

If by addressing nutrition, environment, stress and other key areas we take pressure off our animals then the wonderful disease fighting mechanisms of their bodies can work as they were designed to.