SARAH: How do you know if your horse needs electrolytes
and how much to give them?
DR LYDIA GRAY: So how do you know if they need them?
Maybe we should talk about what electrolytes are.
SARAH: That's a great place to start.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Electrolytes are minerals.
And we think of sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium,
magnesium.
And they're charged minerals.
They are throughout the body.
They're important in hydration status, pH balance.
They kind of run everything.
So if your minerals, your electrolytes,
are out of whack or out of balance,
you're going to have muscle contraction issues.
You're going to have nerve transmission problems.
You're not going to have the chemical reactions
and the metabolism going correctly.
They're responsible for all the basic functions of your body.
So if your horse is deficient in electrolytes,
it's going to be that last question, emergency.
So let's enter in before then.
And how you know your horse needs
electrolytes is if your horse is sweating a lot.
So it doesn't have to be Olympic level elite athlete,
it can be an all day trail ride, it
can be I hauled my horse somewhere
and it got really hot back there because it was humid
or there wasn't any air moving or something.
So anytime a horse is sweating, a Cushing's horse maybe
that has a very long hair coat in the summer that
wasn't clipped.
Doesn't have to be doing four star eventing.
So if you're sweating, if you're a horse,
you're sweating out liquid, fluid,
and you have to rehydrate.
But you're also sweating out electrolytes
that need to be replaced.
The first one I think I mentioned was sodium.
So when you put sodium and chloride together
that makes salt. And just standing, breathing,
and blinking.
Horses need about 10 grams of sodium.
So that's about 25 grams of salt.
And that's about an ounce or so, which is two tablespoons.
SARAH: Considerable amount.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Depending on and I did all the math for you.
So whether you like to talk in tablespoons, or grams,
or ounces, it's all there.
That's the basic.
And hay, pasture, grains even, they don't
have a lot of salt in them.
So every horse is going to need salt. And you might know,
I'm not a fan of salt blocks, because the original ones
that are very rough those large 50 pound ones, they're made
for cattle tongues.
Which if you've been licked by a cattle tongue, you know
they're very rough.
They love them, they're great.
But horses, sometimes, will - "I'm not
getting what I need from here."
So they chew it with their incisors.
They scrape it.
So, you know right there.
So we like to top dress our salt and our electrolytes.
And there's a couple products.
You can top dress powders.
You can top dress pellets.
Because you can imagine just plain salt
or plain electrolytes can be a little bit tacky.
So if you put it in a pellet, it's got some flavor in there,
and it's less likely to be blown out or dumped over or left
in the bottom.
I'm also not a huge fan of putting the electrolytes
in the water.
But if you do that and you've trained your horse
to drink that, make sure you have a bucket of plain water.
Because that's the point.
You can't just give them electrolytes.
You have to give them plain water.
Because that's what they're supposed to do after they
have electrolytes.
So you have to have plain water available.
SARAH: Because otherwise they're just getting thirsty
and then drinking and getting more thirsty.
And you don't want that.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Yeah, and so you're unbalancing further
their internal systems.
SARAH: So it sounds like your horse always
needs electrolytes.
He just needs to be fed more if you
notice those things like the sweating, working very hard.
DR LYDIA GRAY: Yeah, thank you for summarizing this.
That's what I meant to say.
SARAH: I knew it.
I sensed it.