HORSE CARE TIPS AND NEWS

Let’s do a little time travel shall we? It is 1997, not particularly significant time travel I know, but bear with me. Grand Meadows has been in business a little over ten years but the market is becoming increasingly flooded with more and more horse supplements in every category. Horse joint supplements are exploding and numbered, back then, over 100, which was a huge change from a few years before when there were 3 joint supplements – Cosequin, Grand Flex and Flex Free. Life was simple back then….

Funnily enough I just got off the phone with a trainer crying the blues about her feed room and how crazy her clients are about feeding multiple supplements. So along with numerous other conversations with trainers it is readily apparent that this problem, if anything, is getting worse. Again, as I finished in the last blog, this is not supposed to scare you but to make you more aware of potential pitfalls of feeding multiple supplements, none of which were necessarily designed to be fed together and on that note we will get into the minerals.

For some time at Grand Meadows we have been concerned about the widespread issue of over-feeding of horse supplements. It’s done with all good intentions ….combine greater nutritional knowledge with an ever expanding and, frankly, overwhelming supply of different horse supplements available in the marketplace. 

Even if you are relatively conservative with supplements you might still be feeding ingredient(s) that, perhaps together with a fortified grain product, could be potentially harmful by upsetting mineral ratios for example. At the very least people are often wasting money. This sentiment may be surprising coming from a horse supplement manufacturer but our core principle is the health of your horse not shoving as many products as possible at you.  I can remember on numerous occasions advising customers not to feed one of our supplements for one reason or another, which is normally met with a certain amount of surprise. At the other end of the scale I hear of other, high profile horse supplement manufacturers constantly pushing additional products on top of any other supplements the customer might be feeding. One manufacturer, which claims an all in one complete nutrition product, will happily promote the idea of feeding multiple additional formulas in addition to their “all-in-one” product under what can only be described as a relentless effort to glean as much money as they possibly can from their customers without any concern as to the cumulative effect of so many additional ingredients.

You know it’s a funny thing that if you go back about 30 years ago the idea of feeding a horse supplement would probably never have entered your head. People fed their horses hay and grain, maybe a bit of oil and that was about it, So what happened to create this now massive marketplace, catering for every conceivable ailment or nutritional deficiency?