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Many horses have recurring health issues due to changing temperatures and weather conditions. Hot weather causes circulatory problems, and the body loses electrolytes through heavy sweating. Which further weakens the horse.

It is therefore important to provide the horses with a good mineral supply. The OKAPI Mineral Pur G offers itself or – for pastures on sandy soils – the Pasture Mineral GS (both from Okapi), which is optimised for mineral-poor soils.

If you ride ambitiously on a regular basis and your horse works up a sweat, electrolytes should also be supplied daily to replenish the stores.

Older horses and former sport horses often suffer from circulatory colic when the weather changes, which is often caused by left-sided heart insufficiency.

The heart can be strengthened: either in the classic herbal way with tried and tested hawthorn as a herb or as an extract as well as with the administration of L-carnitine (OKAPI).

Okapi L-Carnitine
© OKAPI GmbH

Not all mash is the same

This stabilises the circulation so that the horses react less sensitively to changes in the weather and sultry heat. It may also be advisable to give a mash as a preventative measure.

It is best to make up your own classic mash, as most commercial mashes are more like muesli mash and have nothing in common with the effect of a “real” mash.

A mash consists only of:
2 parts wheat bran
1 part crushed oats (if the horse tolerates oats, otherwise some dextrose can also be added as a quick energy supplier),
½ part cooked linseed and
1 tbsp salt (without fluorine and iodine!).

Pour hot water over the whole thing and let it swell into a liquid mash, ready to be slurped up.

Drinking is extremely important

Also make sure that the horses drink enough. Older horses in particular often drink too little and if only self-drinkers (the classic “I press it and then more or less water comes” drinker) are available, then these make many horses lazy about drinking.

Most horses much prefer to drink from buckets with a closed water surface than from self- drinkers which makes so-called float drinkers much more popular than the “pressure tongue drinkers”.

If in doubt, it is better to set up water buckets in addition to the drinking troughs. Please make sure that they are not the black rubber buckets from the DIY store, as these release plasticisers into the water. Either hard plastic buckets are suitable or those specifying food safety standards on the bucket:

https://www.kraemer.de/…/Fut…/Wasser-und-Futterbottich-Toni…)

or the luxurious cattle watering troughs, which are even available with a floating valve system and garden hose connection, so that there is no need to drag water around or worry about it overflowing (if you forget to turn the water off in time):

https://www.weidezaun.info/kerbl-langtraenke-mit-schwimmerv…

or discarded bathtubs, which you can always “clean up” cheaply – and, with a bit of skill, even insulate for the winter so that the water doesn’t freeze immediately in sub-zero temperatures.

Lazy drinkers can often be motivated to drink more water by giving them very watery mash or increasingly watery hay cobs. For some, a sip of apple or carrot juice added to the water bucket can help.

A horse should get 30-50 litres of drinking water a day. If a horse is significantly below this amount of water, you should think about how you can motivate the horse to drink more water (unless there is a lot of green pasture grass available, as the horses naturally absorb a lot of water from this).

All these measures are no guarantee that there will be no more circulatory colic, but at least they reduce the risk.

You can also read more on the topic of circulation in connection with high temperatures here: Electrolytes for Horses: Helping You to Beat the Heat!

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