Horses have difficulty regulating their body temperature when temperatures exceed 90 degrees. If humidity is high, the temperature doesn’t even have to reach 90 degrees to make life uncomfortable.

Everyone has heard about the ketogenic diet by now, or “keto” for short. It’s basically a reinvention of the Atkins diet with more emphasis on eating fat.

The horse industry is littered with fallacy. Start by hosing or sponging cold water down the neck over the jugular veins, along the belly and in between the hind legs (look for the big dilated veins!). The repetitive application of cold water is the KEY to removing excess heat from the body.

The “whole food” claim is being used to market some feeds and supplements for horses, but what is a whole food and are these products really superior?

Owens explains, “Horse caregivers often soak or steam hay to reduce its non-structural carbohydrate (NCS), including water soluble carbohydrates (WSCs). A high dietary intake of these carbohydrates can be detrimental to some horses.”

“Until now, we didn’t have research supporting the idea that chemo works for equines,” said Luethy. “There were studies on specific chemo drugs but nothing covering a range of chemotherapeutic protocols. The goal of our study was to understand whether chemo prolongs life for horses with the disease.”

Splash White 5 was identified in a group of related French Paint Horses—these horses, a stallion and seven of his daughters, had white spotting that resembled existing Splash White patterns, but they tested negative for the four existing alleles that create those coat patterns as well as other white spotting patterns. Whole genome sequencing helped identify a new Splash White spotting pattern in these horses, created as a result of a genetic deletion of the MITF gene—the MITF gene is the same location where two other Splash White spotting patterns (Splash White 1and Splash White 3) reside. The research, led by J. Henkel of the University of Bern (Switzerland) Institute of Genetics, was published in the April 2019 issue of Animal Genetics—read the study’s abstract and full-text online. Since then, Splash White 5 has been identified in U.S.-based Paint Horses, as well.