DAN: "When feeding a miniature horse,
how do you balance keeping the gut full
and keeping them at a good weight?
I've had issues with colic in the past.
I've heard giving them a little mineral oil
as part of their diet helps.
Is this true?
How big of a concern are ulcers, founder, and laminitis?"
So again, we got a lot of community comments on this one,
particularly from xKharismaticx, who says, "I have a mini
and am always struggling to feed her enough without her getting
fat," which is something I think we're all dealing
with currently in quarantine.
[CHUCKLES]
DR LYDIA GRAY: You mean like, personally?
DAN: Personally.
[LAUGHS]
DR LYDIA GRAY: Right.
OK, so a lot of great questions-- again,
keep me on track to make sure I answer them all.
So some miniature horses--
here's your trivia thing.
In driving, you know I carriage drive,
there's a lot of miniature horses in this sport.
Do you know what we call them?
Like, when you're signing up for a show,
you have the draft horse division and horse
and large pony, small pony?
Do you remember?
DAN: Ooh, for the miniature horse?
Because I remember you talked about it last year
because you did some driving with miniatures last year,
right?
DR LYDIA GRAY: I did, last year.
DAN: I don't remember, though.
DR LYDIA GRAY: We call them VSEs, Very Small Equines.
DAN: [LAUGHS] Appropriately named.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Appropriately, yeah, yeah.
So they are horses.
They have all the same issues and concerns
as large breed horses.
But because of their size, they also
have some specific concerns that just relate to them.
And she's hit on a lot of them.
I think the first one was keeping
the gut full at a good weight.
Minis tend towards obesity.
They have that thrifty gene.
They have evolved to get a lot of nutrition
out of very little food.
They're very efficient.
One resource I looked at said, "minis have robust appetites."
So that's it.
And then, add to that, if you're used
to having larger breed horses, you have a tendency
to overfeed them.
So between their uber-efficiency and your tendency
to overfeed them and they don't get exercised
as much, commonly, as large breed horses,
you don't even work at it.
DAN: Yeah, you're not riding five times a week.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Yeah, then it's sort of the perfect storm,
right?
So I think the first step is to know your mini's weight
and body condition score.
So the body condition scoring is the same.
We use that Henneke scale.
We have a video.
We have articles on our website.
And it goes from 1 to 9, and you want
to keep your mini at 5, which is ideal.
And watch that-- my favorite term-- regional adiposity,
which is the fat deposits, the lumps, like in the neck
and behind the shoulder and the dock of the tail.
Those are not good.
DAN: Well, that's good to know because with minis, I
think it's easy for them to all have that potbelly kind of look
to them.
But to your point, it's good to do
the whole body condition score to see,
are we seeing any fat deposits? and not just use that round
belly to kind of gauge it.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Yeah, and you should do the body condition
scoring and the weight at least once a month,
if not more frequently-- like every two weeks, and maybe more
frequently in times of the year when there's changes.
DAN: When the grass is coming in and things like that?
DR LYDIA GRAY: Yep, we'll talk more about grass in a second.
DAN: Oh, sorry.
[LAUGHS]
DR LYDIA GRAY: So what you need to weigh your mini
is just a soft measuring tape, like a seamstress tape.
I don't sew, but I think I got this at a JOANN's Fabric
or something.
Because weight tapes, like the traditional commercial ones
that have-- you just put them around the girth,
and they have the numbers on there.
They don't work for minis because of the proportions.
They're not right.
So you have to do the heart girth
measurement and the length, but you can't even
use the equine weight calculator that we have on our website
because it's not proportioned right either.
DAN: OK.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Minis have their own formula
that has been validated, and it's very long and complicated.
So I'm not going to say it.
I'm just going to have our videographer put it up
on screen, and then people can pause it and write down.
DAN: [LAUGHS] Love it.
DR LYDIA GRAY: But I was thinking,
it'll be good homeschooling.
It'll be good math homework that you and your kids
can do together.
DAN: I feel like we should have people send in their equations
after.
DR LYDIA GRAY: That's a great idea!
That's a great idea.
I will tell you that the average mini
weight is 250 pounds, because we're
going to use it in a second.
We're going to talk about diet, right?
So the same guidelines or rule of thumb works.
You want to feed 1 and 1/2% to 2% of the body weight per day
in total food, which for these guys
is going to be forage because they don't really need grain.
They're so efficient.
They don't need calories.
DAN: They're so thrifty, yeah.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Yeah, so if you weigh 250 pounds
and you're getting 2% of your body weight per day,
that's only 5 pounds.
DAN: Oh my god, which just so different
than how we feed horses.
DR LYDIA GRAY: So you need-- you really
need to weigh your hay before you feed it.
So the three things you should do with the mini hay-- well,
maybe four--
you need to have it analyzed because it's
got to be low NSC, or nonstructural carbohydrates.
And by that, I mean less than about 12% or 15%.
So you analyze it.
You weigh it.
Then you soak it.
Get the last little bit of sugars out of it.
And then, for this person who asked the question
in the community, you probably need
to put it in some form of slow hay feeder,
whether it's a bag, a net, or something you make it yourself.
And they even make feeders that sit on the ground.
You put the hay in and they have to go through holes or slots
to get the hay.
DAN: And this is regardless if your mini has a condition
or not.
I know a lot of these recommendations you're
giving right now, usually we tell people
with horses who have laminitis or easy keepers
and things of that nature.
You're saying this is regardless.
If you have a miniature horse, this
is the best feeding choice for them.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Because they're little hoovers.
They vacuum up everything, and you've
got to slow them down and increase their chew time
and make the hay last.
There was one study in-- oh, I forget where it was.
It was in 2016, and they created a device.
I don't know if it's commercially available.
Maybe the gifted person could make it using a timer,
but they had a sliding door on the forage source.
And it would allow them to eat for a while.
And then it would close.
Then they had a fence line and to get the food again
on the other side of the device, where that door opened,
they had to walk around the fence.
DAN: Oh, really?
Make them get exercise for it?
DR LYDIA GRAY: Yeah, so you eat a little bit.
You exercise a little bit.
You eat a little bit.
You exercise a little bit.
But that was automatic.
DAN: I like that.
DR LYDIA GRAY: There are all sorts of creative ways
that people have set up ways to have
horses exercise a little bit while they're eating.
So you could look into that.
DAN: I was going to say, I've seen that around a little bit,
where they put the hay at one end
and then maybe the water is at the other end
or something like that.
So it kind of forces the horse to kind of walk it off.
DR LYDIA GRAY: There's ways you can fence off
your dry lots so that the horses have to move a little bit.
DAN: That's great.
That's a great tip right there.
She did ask a question about the mineral oil.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Yeah, and so colic, yes--
well, they're prone-- like any horse, they can get colic.
They're not prone to, I would say,
more colic, but there are a couple specific kinds of colic
that we see more often in minis.
And that would be fecaliths, enteroliths, and sand colic.
And the sand colic is because they're
hoovering off the ground.
The fecaliths and the enteroliths--
enteroliths, you're familiar with.
They're the mineral concretions that can build up
over time in the horse's gut.
The fecaliths-- the word that the veterinarian might use--
we're going to use today just to have a big, long word
on the screen--
is trichophytobezoar.
DAN: [LAUGHS]
DR LYDIA GRAY: Yeah, and what it means is "tricho" means hair
and "phyto" means plants and "bezoar"
means just ball or mass.
So in essence, this is a hair-plant mass.
It's a horse hair ball!
DAN: There you go.
[LAUGHS]
DR LYDIA GRAY: So the things you want
do to prevent that are groom.
If you've ever groomed one of these,
they have like, horse amount of hair but a little body.
DAN: So much hair-- you can build another mini off of it.
DR LYDIA GRAY: You got to get rid of that hair.
You got to feed them a complete and balanced diet
and do your best to make things last as long as possible,
whether it's moving in between flakes of hay
or putting them in a hay net or bag or some sort of feeder.
You would think you would not want to do a lot of dental work
because you don't want them to be more efficient.
But they have the same amount and size
of teeth as a full-sized horse in a smaller area,
so they tend to have dental problems.
And if they can't chew right, they're sending large particles
back and your chance of an impaction or fecalith
are greater.
DAN: Greatly increased.
DR LYDIA GRAY: You've got to start early on the dental work
and just keep that up.
Be on top of that.
DAN: They're cute, but man.
They are high-maintenance, it sounds like.
[LAUGHS]
DR LYDIA GRAY: And I haven't even gone into all the stuff.
She asked about ulcers and founder and laminitis also.
DAN: Correct.
DR LYDIA GRAY: We've not-- we don't see an increased
prevalence in ulcers.
So that, we can take off our list.
Yay!
But because of their propensity for obesity,
they are at higher risk for laminitis.
The AAEP foundation, so their charitable arm,
just finished a four-year study on laminitis.
They looked at about 200 horses with laminitis
to try to get some hard data around this terrible,
life-threatening disease.
And they found that obesity is the biggest risk
factor for laminitis.
DAN: So that is number one?
DR LYDIA GRAY: Number one, yeah.
And also top of the list was recent diet or stabling
changes, exposure to lush pastures,
and then having endocrine or metabolic conditions
like Cushing's or equine metabolic syndrome.
So one person, Dr. Nick Frank from Tufts University,
who's an expert in this area, he suggested owners of minis
have their vet out at least once a year, maybe more often,
to do a complete physical exam and maybe even
do screening tests for equine metabolic syndrome
and Cushing's disease.
So in equine metabolic syndrome, it'd
be the oral sugar test to check for their insulin resistance
because once you have that--
DAN: I was going to say, proactively,
because you know your mini might already be...
DR LYDIA GRAY: Because maybe right now,
you let your mini go out with the other horses on pasture.
But if you begin to see that your horse is developing
a metabolic or endocrine disease,
pasture might not be in that mini's future.
And so we sell a mini muzzle.
DAN: I was just going to ask, yep.
DR LYDIA GRAY: And that's an option.
But they might need to be dry-lotted or paddocked.
It just might not be an option.
So of course, you wouldn't leave them in alone.
You'd have somebody with them.
But if I could let my mini have grass, just a little bit,
don't--
people feel terrible when they put a muzzle on their horse.
My horse is muzzled, and he puts it on himself.
I hold it out, and he puts his head in.
And he's like, let's go.
Because he knows, I don't go out to pasture without my helmet
on.
DAN: Is this Newman?
DR LYDIA GRAY: Yeah!
DAN: Aww.
DR LYDIA GRAY: So he knows.
So we talked about how to make the food last and obesity.
We talked about laminitis, and we talked about the colic.
Oh, the mineral oil--
I know some vets that do that.
But I've not seen any paper or study, any research, that
says there's a benefit to it.
So I don't particularly advocate for it.
I know even when there is a colic going on
that vets have gotten away from putting the stomach tube down
and giving mineral oil.
We tend to give water, electrolytes, and other things.
We don't even give mineral oil for that anymore.
DAN: I was going to say, I've been
hearing that the last couple of years, that vets
have been moving away from doing the mineral oils during colic.
DR LYDIA GRAY: So talk to your vet.
Don't let it give you a false sense of security.
Oh, I give my mini a cup of minute oil whatever
in his feed, and he's fine.
I'm not so sure that that's having a benefit.
DAN: It sounds like there's these other steps that you
could be doing, as far as how to feed, how much to feed,
that are going to set you up for more success, potentially.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Correct.
DAN: Awesome.
Well, hopefully, that's a lot of information to digest there.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Oh, no pun intended!
DAN: I didn't even try.
It just worked out that way.
But hopefully, this helps you and your mini out.
And of course, if you have any other questions,
please feel free to reach out.