The essential nutrients for horses include carbohydrates, protein, fat, minerals, vitamins, and water. Horses can obtain these nutrients from pasture forage, harvested roughages, and concentrates. It’s important to ensure horses receive adequate amounts of these nutrients to maintain their health, growth, reproduction, and performance.
What are the Key Minerals for Horses?
Minerals are crucial for various bodily functions in horses, including bone development, nerve function, and enzyme activity. The most important minerals for horses include:
- Calcium and Phosphorus: These are heavily drawn upon to produce bones. Good sources of calcium and phosphorus are bonemeal, dicalcium phosphate, and defluorinated phosphates.
- Sodium Chloride (Common Salt): Farm animals generally need more common salt than is contained in their feeds, and they are supplied with it regularly.
- Iodine: Small amounts of iodine are needed by animals for the formation of thyroxine, a compound containing iodine, secreted by the thyroid gland.
- Copper, Cobalt, and Iron: These are needed along with iron for the formation of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying pigment of the red blood cells.
- Zinc: Normal diets for swine are often deficient in zinc, especially in the presence of excess calcium.
- Magnesium, Manganese, Potassium, Sulfur, Molybdenum, and Selenium: These minerals are also essential for animal life.
What are the Key Vitamins for Horses?
Vitamins are organic compounds that are essential for various physiological processes in horses. The most important vitamins for horses include:
- Vitamin A: It is required for growth, reproduction, milk production, and the maintenance of normal resistance to respiratory infections.
- Vitamin D: It enables animals to use calcium and phosphorus; a deficiency causes rickets in young growing animals.
- Vitamin E: It is necessary for the normal hatching of eggs and plays a role along with selenium in preventing muscle stiffness and paralysis (dystrophy) in lambs, calves, and chicks under certain conditions.
- B Vitamins (Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin, Pantothenic Acid, Choline, Biotin, Folic Acid, Vitamins B6 and B12): These are most likely to be deficient in ordinary feeds; special supplements are needed by pigs, poultry, and laboratory animals.
- Vitamin K: It is synthesized by bacteria in the intestinal tract and can be absorbed, and, if livestock can ingest feces, a dietary supply is usually not important.
- Vitamin C: It can be synthesized in the bodies of most other animals and need not be supplied in their food.
How Can You Ensure Horses Get Enough Vitamins and Minerals?
Ensuring horses receive adequate vitamins and minerals involves a balanced diet and appropriate supplementation.
- Pasture and Forage: Good quality grass-legume pastures, in addition to iodized or trace-mineralized salt, will supply adequate nutrients to maintain an adult horse at light work or mares during pregnancy.
- Commercial Feeds: A large and ever-growing number of horses stabled in cities and suburbs where sufficient roughages cannot be grown provide a large market for complete horse rations, including roughage, which are tailored to the total needs of specific animals according to their particular function at a given time, such as growth, pregnancy, lactation, or maintenance.
- Mineral Supplements: To furnish both calcium and phosphorus, grazing livestock may be allowed free access to such a mixture as 60 percent dicalcium phosphate and 40 percent common salt. Trace mineralized salt is used when copper or cobalt may be deficient.
- Vitamin Supplements: Vitamin A supplement is added to animal diets to ensure a supply when livestock are not fed green forages and are not on good pasture.
What are the signs of vitamin or mineral deficiency in horses?
Signs of mineral deficiency include anemia unless the deficiency is corrected by means of a suitable mineral supplement. A serious deficiency of iodine may cause goitre, a disease in which the thyroid gland enlarges greatly. Vitamin D deficiency causes rickets in young growing animals. Vitamin E plays a role along with selenium in preventing muscle stiffness and paralysis (dystrophy) in lambs, calves, and chicks under certain conditions.
Can horses get too many vitamins or minerals?
Yes, excessive amounts of some minerals, such as molybdenum, selenium, iodine, copper, cobalt, and zinc, can be toxic to animals.
Do different types of horses have different vitamin and mineral needs?
Yes, horses will vary from the normal requirement in terms of weight, temperament, and previous nutrition. Weanling foals require three pounds of feed per hundred pounds of live weight per day; as they approach maturity, this requirement drops to one pound of feed per hundred pounds of live weight daily.
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