Here’s the bad news:

Colic is the #1 cause of death in horses.

Impaction colic is involved in about 80% of all colic types.

Here’s the good news:

Impaction colic is totally preventable.

In today’s Horse Mysteries Solved podcast, I’ll share with you an easy to remember analogy about how the intestine works — which is surprisingly like an airport –, and what is best to feed horses to avoid impaction colic.

Links Mentioned:
Happy Horse :) – Mini Course

Summary:
Summary by AI:

Dr. Renee Tucker discusses the prevalence of colic in horses, particularly impaction colic, which accounts for 80% of cases and is a leading cause of death. She likens the horse’s large intestine to a “Travelator” and explains the normal flow of food through the digestive system. Tucker emphasizes the importance of maintaining a healthy microbial population in the intestine for proper fermentation and digestion. Factors such as gaps in feeding, antibiotics, dewormers, and pharmaceutical drugs can disrupt this balance, leading to impaction. She advocates for continuous access to hay to prevent colic, despite concerns about overeating initially. Tucker recommends providing a variety of hay and allowing for movement, ideally through a track system, to support optimal digestion. Overall, she highlights the importance of understanding and maintaining the equine digestive system to prevent colic and promote horse health.

Transcript:
Renee (00:07)
Hello, friends. Today, I would love to chat with you about colic, recurrent colic, and how we can avoid that entirely. If you’re not familiar with me, I am Dr. Renee Tucker, holistic equine betonarian for over 30 years, and I’m also the creator of the Tucker biokinetic technique, which is a energy technique for aligning horses. Okay, that being said, let’s talk about colic. And how to avoid it, most importantly. If you don’t know, and this is a terrible statistic, colic is responsible for 30% of horse deaths. That depends on the study. I’ve seen 30, I’ve seen up to 60% of deaths are from colic. And that is in horses over one year old. Still, that’s extremely high. Now, let’s think about this because impaction colic is about 80% of those colics. Even the gassy colics, they have some… A portion of it is impaction related. So we’re looking at 80% of colics, approximately, cause 30 to 50% of horse deaths. Now, what’s an impaction? It’s really where the poop, the hay that’s going to be poop, is stuck in the large intestine. It is packed in there. It’s called an impaction. The horse is having moving it.

Renee (01:31)
Basically, it’s constipation. If we were to read a newspaper headline that was for humans and it said, 30 to 50% of humans are dying from constipation, we’d all be like, What? That’s crazy. What is going on? We have got to change this. That doesn’t even make sense. And that’s where we’re at with the horse. I just think that’s because of some old information, and I’m hoping to bring new information here. So we do not want infarction colic for sure. It’s bad. I don’t want to go into a bunch of stories about how bad colic can be because I have those stories, but I’m sure you’ve heard them or been there yourself. And I like to keep this podcast positive and uplifting because there’s plenty of bad things in the world. You know what I’m saying? So let’s fix this problem because we can. Okay. I’d like to tell you a story. It’s this analogy of the horse’s intestine with the Travelator. Now, if you don’t know what that is, I’m very excited to tell you. Because if you’ve been in an airport, if you’ve been in a big enough airport, some of them have those, what they call moving walkways.

Renee (02:49)
They’re really like flat escalators. They’re also called people movers. Here in America, you’ll hear things like, Warning, warning, the moving escalator is about to stop or whatever. Well, I got a chance to go to Australia a couple of times, and I was so delighted to know that the moving walkway in Australia is called a Travelator. I think that’s great. I think they should all be called Travelators. In my little story, I’d like to call the large intestine, the Travelator. You’ll find out why here in a second. Okay, Now that we know what I’m talking about, why I say travel later, it’s the large intestine. Let’s talk about the normal flow of food through the horse’s body. We’re just going to go with hay right now. They eat the hay, they chew it up into smaller pieces in the mouth. It goes to the stomach and small intestine, where digestion does start, but that is mostly breaking it up into even smaller pieces. For clarity, I’m going to call them itty-bitty pieces. The itty-bitty pieces arrive at the large intestine, which I’m calling the travelator. Why? Because the itty-bitty hay pieces just sit in the large intestine and they travel through it.

Renee (04:19)
And you guys, it takes generally about a day for those itty-bitty hay pieces to travel through the large intestine. They are not in any hurry. They are just moving along slowly but truly. Then, those itty-bitty hay pieces get to the secum, and they are dumped into the secum slowly but truly. Itty-bitty pieces go in the secum. Then the party starts. The secum, I love to call it the magical fermentation secum. This is where the fermentation happens. This is where hundreds of species of bacteria, plus other microorganisms, fungai, all things are in there. They’re excited about their itty-bitty hay pieces because many of them eat those itty-bitty hay pieces. What’s even crazy about this magical fermentation, is there’s bacteria and other microorganisms that eat the poop of the bacteria that eat the hay. So it’s like multi-layered. It’s crazy. There’s also an anaerobic part which has oxygen in it. There’s a hole, and those have certain bacteria and other microorganisms. And then there is an anaerobic part where there’s no oxygen at all, and there’s bacteria and microorganisms for that. They’re all separate, but yet working together. I mean, it’s really pretty cool. In this magical fermentation bat of the secum, the horse gets all of its energy, all of its calories for weight gain, and all it gasses, and that’s the gurgling that you hear, which is happy gurgling.

Renee (06:06)
We like happy gurgling. People, when we have gurgling, it may be not so happy, all right? But horses are supposed to gurgle. Then the microorganisms do their work in the secum, give the horse all the energy. Also, all the heat comes off for thermoregulation. That’s why they don’t necessarily need a blanket in the winter. They have a heat generator in their intestine. So they get all that stuff done in the magical secum. And then when they’re done with all the hay that’s been put in, then the secum pushes that finished product, if you will, out to the remaining little bit of small intestine and the rectum. And in those parts, they absorb the water and form the fecal balls. So that’s what’s supposed to happen. If that’s what’s happening, there is no colic. Now, yes, there are other types of colic. There’s enteroliths, there’s torsions, there’s nefrosplenic entrapments. All of these, yes, they can be unrelated to food. Sort of not really, but I’m just going to leave them at the moment. We’re just going to deal with the 80% of colic, which is related to impaction. It’s totally avoidable. Let’s talk about what happens to the magical fermentation bat.

Renee (07:33)
Well, let me tell you all the problems. Who doesn’t want to know all the problems? All right. When there is a gap in the travelator of food for hours, Then the microorganisms in the magical fermentation bed start to starve, and they do starve, and they die off. All right, so now you have much fewer microorganisms to doing the work. And because they die off, those dead microorganisms themselves change the PH of the fermentation bed, which will kill more microorganisms because they can’t live in that PH. I have fewer and fewer microorganisms happening. Now, they do proliferate. They do multiply when they can, but they have to have food. If microorganisms don’t have food, or poop, which might be their food, see, it gets a little complicated, then they just die off. They’re like, Well, my purpose is done here. There’s no more food, and off they go. All right? Okay, so if there’s a gap in the travelator later, microorganisms die off. If you feed the horse any grain, when that grain arrives via Travelator to the magical fermenter fermentation bed of the secum, the green changes the PH. Microorganisms die. If you feed the horse pasture grass, delicious.

Renee (09:13)
It’s delicious. It’s like sugar cereal. But when that pasture grass arrives at the magical fermentation bed of the secum, the microorganisms are like, Oh my gosh, too much sugar. They’re killing me. And they die. It doesn’t matter if it’s high sugar or low sugar or what time of day it is or what the sun doing. Pasture grass is not good for the microorganisms in the secum and thus not good for the horse. Okay, I think you’re getting the idea here. We need the magical fermentation bat to be happy. And then what happens when it goes wrong is something like this. So there’s not enough microorganisms in the magical fermentation bat for multiple reasons. The ones I just mentioned, plus any antibiotics, any dewormers, any vaccines, any pharmaceutical drugs of any kind are going to kill off bacteria and microorganisms in the magical fermentation bed. So for whatever reason, could be any reason, the bed is not good. It’s way low on its magical bacteria, guys. So the fermentation bed is like, I don’t have enough workers here. Slow down the input from the travelator. So the large intestine slows down even more. Now we’re taking one to two days to get the itty-bitty hay pieces to the secum.

Renee (10:54)
That’s okay. The travelator or the large intestine, It has some ability to vary its size and shape, like our intestines. They get big when they’re full and small when they’re not full. So the large intestine is approximately in a thousand pound horse, 18 feet long, approximately. It’s approximately 6 inches in diameter, generally speaking. When it gets full, you’d say there’s a very large meal all at once, it can get comfortably 8 inches in diameter. At full stretch, when it’s really too full, it can get as wide as a foot in diameter. But generally, it’s about 6 inches. So back to when the fermentation bath does not have the workers, the microorganisms. It says, Slow down the travel later. I can’t deal with any more hay right now. I don’t have the workers. Fine. It slows down. Now, if it continues to slow down because perhaps the horse is on continuous antibiotics or continuous butte, whatever, the microorganisms can’t catch up. They can’t proliferate fast enough compared to the ones that are being killed off. So the travel later slows down and it slows down more. And it’s food, the itty-bitty hay pieces starts getting backed up.

Renee (12:26)
The intestine has expanded as much as it can So now there’s a backup, basically a traffic jam in the travelator. If this continues, at some point, the horse travelator, large intestine, cannot deal with it anymore. It stretches much. It literally stops moving. It has to. Nothing’s going forward. By the way, you can get impactions right at the seagum, at the doorway of the seagum. That’s because the seagum can’t take it anymore in. It’s backed up there, but it It back up anywhere in large intestine, and it will stop. That’s called an impaction. At the point that the travelator stops, the horse realizes, Uh-oh, my intestinal tract has stopped and it is stretched as far as it can go. I better not put any more water in there. It’s too full. It can’t take any more expansion. So at the point of impaction, then the horse stops drinking. This is the exact reverse of what I thought, what I was thought, believed was horses get impactioned, because they stopped drinking for whatever reason. Maybe it’s too cold, maybe they goticed over. But I’m not talking about a severe dehydration. That’s a separate issue. I’m talking about Generally, when horses get impaction colic, it’s blamed on not drinking enough water.

Renee (14:06)
And that’s actually backwards. The impaction colic was starting to happen over days. Finally, the Travelator could not travel anything anymore. It stops. Then the horse stops drinking because it’s full. It’s registering. Everything is full. Can’t do it. Okay. So I hope that wasn’t too scary or negative. The idea here is this originally designed system is fantastic. All you got to do is keep hay in front of the horse all the time. The horse does not eat 24 hours a day. They do take breaks, but the horse can sense when the Travelator is full or not full or there’s a gap, the horse’s intestine can change shapes. It It can shrink a little bit to eliminate gaps. It could expand when there’s a glut of food. But overall, the horse just needs access to hay all the time because you don’t know when those microorganisms are hungry. Try to think of it as we are feeding those microorganisms via a continuous travelator-feeder. When those microorganisms get hungry, that’s when the horse gets a signal to eat. It’s just totally different than us. We get a signal from our stomach that says, Hey, our stomach’s empty, so we eat.

Renee (15:37)
I guess it’s similar. But anyways, it really is different because we don’t ferment our food. Horses do. That’s where they get all their power and energy from. Okay. So last thing just to mention is sometimes people are concerned when the horses do start with free access to hay all the time, that they’ll over eat. Guess what? They will. This is because if they’ve been fed two or three times a day, their whole life, and now finally, they are not starving in between feedings, they will go crazy. It’ll look like they’re starving because they are. Those microorganisms, I’ve been telling them, eat, eat, eat. They’ve had huge gaps in the travel here, and the organisms are dying off. They’re like, feed me, feed me, feed me. Feed them. Lots of hay. Yes, it generally takes 2-3 months for the horse to reset their brain, really. Say, Okay, I’m not going to starve. I will not have constant signaling to eat that I can’t do. Now there is always hay in front of me. Hopefully, ideally on some track system so they can get the movement. The magical fermentation in that is a lot better if the horse is moving very frequently.

Renee (16:58)
So a track system is ideal. Even if it’s tiny, do whatever you can to make a track system for your horse. Okay, so yes, it may take 2-3 months for them to acclimate to constant hay in front of them. And yes, they might look a little bit overweight. Don’t worry about it. It’s all going to even out over time once they can relax and really believe and know that the hay is always going to be there. If you always have hay in front of your horse, you You’re going to be great. Now, I do know sometimes, accident happens, you have to put your horse on antibiotics. Just know about this system. Sure, you can give probiotics to help a little bit, but Mostly, you just need to keep the hay in front of them. The horses will correct themselves. Bacteria and microorganisms can multiply like crazy. Just let them have a variety of hay in front of them, please, because you’ll get a better variety of microorganisms if you feed a variety of hay. Always try to avoid, as best you can, rye and alfalfa. Those are not good. Those are fine. So I hope when you feed your horse hay today or tomorrow, you think of the Travelator and the magical fermentation bed and how it all works, because it’s really quite wonderful.

Renee (18:24)
All right, that’s all for today. I will talk to you guys next time.

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