Holistic Horse Education

22/09/2024

Dear valued clients,

I want to thank you for your continued support of holistic horse education and my hoof care services. I’ve always strived to keep my prices as low as possible, but with the current economy, I’ve had to make the decision to adjust them.

Effective from October 1st: trims will increase by $5 per horse.

I’ve put this off as long as I could, and I truly appreciate your understanding during these times. Your horses’ well-being remains my top priority, and I look forward to continuing to provide the best care possible.

Thank you

22/09/2024

Fact…🤣🤣🤣

13/09/2024

10/09/2024

He clearly gets worked too hard 🥰

09/09/2024

Today I trimmed this gorgeous little rescued donkey under a full general anaesthetic. I’ve included a detailed explanation of the process and X-rays of before and after.

There is a sped up video at the start trimming the less problematic hind hoof and then real time of the problem hoof.

I hope this helps to show people the importance of regular hoof care and reporting animals who aren’t being cared for.

A big shout out to his new owner for putting in so much work. Even with the last experience with myself and the vets only a week ago he has still made progress with his confidence.

To the wonderful vets at Elite Equine making my job doable and safe. And for keeping the little guy safe throughout the process.

To Hoof Care Australia for speedily sending a tube of Shufix glue. Even though we didn’t end up using it, it was really important to have it on hand in case we did need it.

And to The Hoof Co for their amazing products that I used on this little guys extensive seedy toe resections.

08/09/2024

07/09/2024

Obesity is just as much of a welfare issues as those that are too thin!

04/09/2024

Yes! Do you understand what the actions for your pretty words are like for the learner you use them on?

01/09/2024

30/08/2024

🐴 𝙇𝙪𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙧𝙤𝙪𝙨 𝘾𝙡𝙖𝙞𝙢𝙨 𝘼𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙇𝙖𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙨

🌱 Spring is TWO days away and guess what category of horses has been flooding my desk this week?! Laminitic horses and those with metabolic dysregulation. Despite all of the science and meticulously researched information we have available on how to best support an equine recovering from laminitis, there is still so much dangerous advice circulating and I’m a bit fed up about it.

🐴 Myth #1: White chaff and hay is what you should feed a laminitic horse.

🌱 Truth #1: White chaff and hay are derived from cereal crops which almost always have a high sugar and starch content. Please, for the love of god, do not feed a laminitic horse wheaten or oaten chaff/hay.

🐴 Myth #2: Bran is a safe feed for laminitic horses as it’s a good source of fibre.

🌱 Truth #2: Bran can be thrown in the same category as white chaffs and hays given it is derived from cereal grains. It is too high in sugar and starch to be considered safe, regardless of the fibre content.

🐴 Myth #3: When soaking hay, the colour of the water indicates how much sugar is being soaked out.

🌱 Truth #3: The dark colouration you see coming from hay that is soaked in water has nothing to do with the sugar content and instead is the tannins and dirt leaching from the hay. Don’t assume clear post-soaking water means that the hay is low in sugar.

🐴 Myth #4: Grain-free premixed feeds are suitable for laminitic horses.

🌱 Truth #4: In my experience, laminitic horses do better on whole food diets rather than premixed feeds. It’s not only the sugar and starch content that is important, but also the protein and fat content and the vitamin and mineral profile. A grain-free feed that is high in protein and fat is still potentially unsuitable, particularly if it does not provide the concentration of key vitamins and trace minerals to meet the very particular nutrient requirements of a metabolic or laminitic horse.

🐴 Myth #5: Feeds that are labelled as “grain-free” or “laminitis safe” are exactly that.

🌱 Truth #5: I know of several feeds labelled “laminitis safe” that contain cereal by-products such as oaten or wheaten chaff/hay. There are also plenty of feeds that claim to be grain-free that contain by-products such as bran, pollard, or millrun. The manufacturer’s argument is that the feed is “whole” grain-free.

🐎 Read your feed, guys. There are so many feeds that are marketed poorly and simply do not support the recovery of our laminitic equines. Stop taking nutritional advice from people who are not up to speed on the latest information regarding feeding the laminitic equine.

28/08/2024

For anyone wondering, leaving the toe is detrimental.

Diagnosis
Diet
Trim
Exercise

That’s how we get these horses sound again.

Long toe is a NO GO!

The goal of orthopaedic intervention for equines with laminitis is to immediately shift the weight of the equine from the damaged, weakened and most painful areas of the hoof to the undamaged areas.

The characteristic stance you often see of a equine suffering with laminitis is the equine trying to do the above itself (to shift its weight onto its heals) = the “classic laminitis stance”.

Why oh why would anyone think that leaving a long toe would have any beneficial effect. There are tens of scientific papers clearly explaining the detrimental effect of a long toe.

The highest amount of loading of the toe occurs when an equine walks (during breakover) and during this time the main shift of the load within the hooves of laminitic horses occurs between the toe and middle hoof regions.

I really shouldn’t have to point this out, but for the 100,000 of people who might be persuaded to think that a long toe is an appropriate rehab for equines recovering from laminitis, I will make this easy to understand:

EASING the breakover phase (which is the time from heel-off to toe-off), by appropriately unloading the toe will MINIMISE the load on the damaged lamellae in the toe region allowing it to heal faster and with the least amount of pain and suffering. Appropriate reductions in the heal and not removing the sole is also extremely important.

In case you are still unsure:

The breakover phase is significantly longer in horses with a long toe, as it acts as a long lever arm. A long lever arm is the last thing that is going to help equines with laminitis.

Ps if there is a laminar wedge - there has been movement within the hoof capsule - this includes rotation and sinking and cannot be estimated by looking at the outside of an equines hoof.

In fact, you can have an equine with more than 2cm of sinking and the hoof can still look “normal” from the outside.

Removing the source of laminitis is paramount (which by the way is not always nutritional), but so is appropriate orthopaedic intervention under the guidance of X-rays.

PPS unsoaked, high quality hay can cause laminitis just as easy as grass, especially in metabolic equines!

Huskamp B. Some notes for the orthopedic treatment of laminitis (Anmerkungen zur orthopädischen Behandlung der Hufrehe) Pferdeheilkunde. 1990;6:3–9. doi: 10.21836/PEM19900101.

Reily PT, Dean EK, Orsini JA. First aid for the laminitic foot: therapeutic and mechanical support. Vet Clin North Am Equine Pract. 2010;26:451–458. doi: 10.1016/j.cveq.2010.06.004

Clayton HM. Comparison of the stride of trotting horses trimmed with a normal and a broken-back hoof axis. Proc Ann Conv Am Assoc Equine Pract. 1998;33:289–298.

28/08/2024

Need hoof help? 👇

🐴𝗛𝗢𝗢𝗙 𝗖𝗔𝗥𝗘 - such a boring subject🥱
✋𝗨𝗡𝗧𝗜𝗟 - you're faced with problems with your horse.
🤔𝗗𝗜𝗗 𝗬𝗢𝗨 𝗞𝗡𝗢𝗪 - that's how many Hoof Care Professionals started❓
👀With a basic understanding of hoof pathogens and simple solutions, you can train your eyes to pick up on the little issues before they become big problems for you - and your horse.

🍀We feel privileged to have helped so many of you with your questions and concerns with our advice - we've now set up an Australian based group𝗝𝗨𝗦𝗧 𝗙𝗢𝗥 𝗬𝗢𝗨.
🤠No judgement, no egos, just practical, helpful advice from Hoof Care Professionals when needed.

🐴https://www.facebook.com/groups/thehoofcoequinehoofcare

⬆️ Head here to join us.
✅Be sure to answer the membership questions upon joining.
⛔This helps us keep the group free from scams and advertising.

25/08/2024

Food is so powerful!

22/08/2024

The amount of horses I see fully rugged in this warm tee shirt weather is alarming!

If it’s above 10 degrees they should be off.

Do you need a thick ski jacket today? Then why do you think your horses do?
We are seeing a huge number of horses that are overheating due to wearing rugs all day. We are also noticing horses that have lost weight or developed skin diseases that has gone undetected due to having had rugs on for months.

Rugs need to be taken off every day, and if you are not able to do this it is best to leave them off completely.
In all my years in equine practice, I have never seen a horse become sick from the cold, but I see issues from rugs and over heating almost daily

21/08/2024

Identifying pain in horses can be tricky. Especially since - as prey animals - they are masters at disguising their discomforts.
Pain and stress also show almost identically. Often we don't know if our horse is saying they're in pain or they are stressed.
The way around this is learning to identify the stress signals and then eliminate potential causes to the best of our abilities until we find the root cause.

Your best indicator for mental or physical discomfort is the eye.
Sadly, we have been desensitized to reading the eye as many ads and artworks show horses in distress.
We also tend to see our animals in mild distress frequently over nuisances like flies and will over time see the facial expressions as normal.
It is important to retrain your eyes and read what the horse tells you.

The eyes showing comfort or pain are all taken from stock images of horses in various situations, from grazing to light work.

The eyes on the bottom were taken of two trauma cases who have found a better home where they finally feel safe.

20/08/2024

Not horses but a really interesting video!
So many of the structures and ailments are the same as horses.

Also take note of the lovely positive reinforcement training!

19/08/2024

Put yourself in your horses place. If they weren’t scared it wouldn’t work.

People like to tell themselves they're just giving the horse "a tickle" or "encouragement" with the whip or it’s just for “communication” or an “extension of my arm”. They also say their horse really loves their "happy mouth" bit because it's rubber coated and tastes of yummy apple! They may give a “cue” that’s actually a threat, and they're told it’s simply "ask, tell, promise" and it sounds kind of benign, even kind of nice.

But there's something different happening for the horse.

We can tell ourselves any story we like to make us feel better.

But if it elicits a response and the consequence of the behaviour is not food, then we need to really think about the fairy stories we're telling ourselves or others are telling us.

Changing the name doesn't change how your horse thinks and feels about it.

🦄

19/08/2024

Want to joint the crack team? 🤣

18/08/2024

I got the start of a new track in today.
About half the posts in.
They’re recycled plastic so I had to get them in while the ground is still soft enough. Anyone got any spare laying around they want to sell please let me know!

Now is the time to get your spring laminitis prevention underway!

This track will be used in the dryer months for the larger ponies.

Second photos are of the amazing rainbow yesterday.

Also tired doggos 😍

14/08/2024

Great explanation of what is a potentially dangerous paper for horse welfare.

*** Edited to ADD: I’ve put a red line through the heading, it’s inaccurate click bait. I took a photo of the article so people would know what I was talking about without having to share the link. Please don’t just read the heading and believe what you read 😉

There’s a couple of articles currently circulating about equine cognition, whether they can "plan ahead and think strategically", based on a recent study about model based learning in horses. I’ve taken a photo as I don’t want to share the link and perpetuate misinformation. I'll put the link to the actual study at the bottom of this post.

The articles, not the study, are rather alarming in their descriptions of the research and people are making a lot of different interpretations from these descriptions.

Here’s a couple of examples of magical mind reading and I believe also misrepresenting the study and suggesting that they knew what the horses were thinking and scheming:

“That was enough for the horses to go: ‘OK, let’s just play by the rules.’”

“It suggests that, rather than failing to grasp the tenets of the game, the horses had understood the rules the whole time but, astutely, had not seen any need to pay much attention to them in the second stage.”

Yikes! That’s a bit of mind reading there! Horses don’t think or plan like this, they didn’t know the “rules” and they weren’t deliberately behaving that way, they did not have enough information to know what to do, that’s all.

- - - - - -

Let me just pop this nice little quote here about Skinner and how good (errorless) training happens:

“In [Skinner’s] system, errors are not necessary for learning to occur. Errors are not a function of learning or vice-versa nor are they blamed on the learner. Errors are a function of poor analysis of behavior, a poorly designed shaping program, moving too fast from step to step in the program, and the lack of the prerequisite behavior necessary for success in the program” (Rosales-Ruiz, 2007).

- - - - - -

What actually happened in the study was that a group of horses firstly were trained to touch their nose to a target, a laminated card and were positively reinforced for that behaviour. They underwent two 1 hour training sessions and were positively reinforced for any kind of touch to the laminated card. That’s a substantial amount of target training and weirdly this was done before conditioning the bridging stimulus. They could have both conditioned the bridging stimulus AND trained the nose target at the same time and it may have made the bridging stimulus more salient by doing it this way.

Then they separately conditioned the meaning of a secondary reinforcer, the bridging stimulus, by pairing the sound of a whistle with food. They undertook two 15 minute sessions involving 3 minute continuous sessions interspersed with 2 minute breaks. Not a lot to condition a bridging stimulus!

The researchers then introduced a stop signal where the horse’s behaviour was marked with the whistle and positively reinforced with food when their nose touched the target only when the stop light was NOT on. Any nose targets during the stop contingency (when the stop light was on) were deemed errors.

What they found was that the horses didn’t discriminate between when they could nose target and when they weren’t supposed to. This is not surprising as presentation of the laminated target is generally considered the Discriminative Stimulus ie. the cue, and there was already a lot of R+ history built on this behaviour and potentially a lot less on the conditioning of the bridging stimulus.

Generally when we are teaching things like nose targets, in the teaching phase, it’s always a good idea to present the target as the cue to touch it and remove it after the behaviour has been performed. This starts to build some discrimination into the behaviour and if we want a target present at all times, which they did in the study, then we have other strategies to teach stimulus control (put the behaviour on cue). Not only using the bridge as they did in the study, but for example combining the new behaviour with another known behaviour. The aim is that the horse cannot touch the target uncued, if they are performing another behaviour that is incompatible with nose targeting. We can interject the cue for the known behaviour to prevent the other behaviour being offered off cue. We can also use our bridging stimulus in the same way. This is an example of “errorless learning” where we do not need to resort to punishment to train the horse and prevent errors.

The researchers went away and designed an additional step where they introduced negative punishment in the way of a 10 second timeout where the person with the target and the food removed themselves.

I feel this study illustrates a number of processes of operant conditioning that we already know exist. Yes, reinforcement increases behaviour, punishment reduces behaviour and consequences influence future behaviour. The study focused on model based learning and yes horses are problem solvers, they can learn this way, they can learn and behave in extremely nuanced and subtle ways, they're not just throwing out behaviour randomly in all directions like a water sprinkler.

I’d also question the role of extinction in the process of introducing the stop light and how that influenced behaviour and especially the number of errors. I’d also question the brief training time for “charging” the whistle and why the behaviour was taught before the bridge was conditioned and done separately.

Whilst I understand that this research needs to be done for people to even consider how equines learn, from my perspective as an equine R+ trainer, I would consider this one of the most basic training sessions that did not set the learner up for success, which is always my aim. R+ training has become very nuanced in how we can avoid errors and I love the errorless mindset.

Finally, to quote B.F. Skinner, the father of Operant Conditioning, “the implication that learning occurs only when errors are made is false”.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159124001874?fbclid=IwY2xjawEn-r1leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHQvfr4e39Guv21AFBfY_eHYab_KX2ZXkXv_psKhh1GPvGb_fOAazzH_LYw_aem_fbh6QbPrapmOW4XEFufR3Q

13/08/2024

Spring time! 🐎🪱🌷🌸

As horse-carers it is your job to know and understand the lifecycles of the parasites that infect your horses. Management of worms is not just about the worms that live inside your horse. I may even be so bold as to say that the worms inside your horse are the least important part of the whole equation. In the long term, as with all infectious diseases, it is far more important to control/manage the source of the infection, rather than the infection itself.

The most important part of (strongyle) worm management in horses is managing the free-living larvae that live on your horses’ pasture. These are the infective stage, and the amount of larvae present on a pasture will have the greatest impact on the amount of worms living inside your horse.

In spring, when the weather warms up, the development of larvae from an egg (deposited in the horses’ manure) into an infective larvae speeds up. In optimal conditions (~15-25oC) this occurs in as little as 5 days. The overall lifecycle takes about 5 - 6 weeks, with a period of time where the larvae have to mature into an adult worm inside the horse before they can begin laying eggs again.

This is where you need to start thinking about the timing of the lifecycle and what is going to happen to your pasture over the next 5 months. (In southern Vic/East NSW and other temperate regions, Aug – Dec is the key time frame.) Eggs will be shed, develop, be ingested, mature, begin shedding eggs again. In as little as five weeks, one egg can turn into an adult female worm that will be shedding 1000’s of eggs per day. Over spring, that can be up to four sets of lifecycles; the larvae will survive on the pasture throughout all of spring, so throughout each lifecycle, the number of larvae will continue to build up.

Horses will have immunity in place to limit the establishment of new worms, however the more infective larvae they are exposed too, the more likely it is their worm burden will increase. Additionally, when horses are exposed to high pasture larval loads, they are more likely to develop encysted larvae burdens. These encysted larvae may not cause a problem until the start of autumn, or even mid-winter the following year; what you do now is not just to manage worms during spring, but also for months in advance.

In spring, your job is to limit/manage how many larvae are on the pasture. How can you do this?

1) Avoid manure build up. Sometimes it is difficult to stay on top of manure pick up so chose other ways such as not over stocking and resting paddocks if you cannot collect all manure.
2) Get *all* your horses FEC-ed, and then deworm your high shedding horses. If you go into spring by eliminating the majority of eggs being shed, you will be one step ahead. This does not mean deworming all of your horses. You can stop 95% of egg shedding by only deworming half your horses. Deworming those horses that are only shedding a few eggs will only cost you more in wormers and continue to drive drug resistance. High-shedding, young and immunocompromised horses may need to be FEC-ed early in spring and also again towards December.
3) Cross-graze, if possible. Rotate through other livestock (cattle, sheep etc) to clean off horse worm larvae. How you do this is up to you – it depends on paddock size, how fast the grass is growing, stocking rates.

To organise your FECs for this spring, there is a full list of drop offs up on the website (see link in comments) plus details on how to post samples in.

If you’d like more specialised help on how to manage your horses/pastures/property I am also available for phone consults – shoot me a message for more info.