During late fall of 1999, both my horses got laminitis after a change in hay. Since I was not feeding any grain and paddocks were not being grazed, it had to be caused by the hay. Three local vets told me they didn’t know why they had laminitis, and I should put them down. Some internet sources suggested that horses with laminitis sometimes had high insulin levels or had Equine Cushing’s disease. Insulin? That could be triggered by the high levels of sugar in the hay. The cool, sunny climate of the high mountain valley were I lived and worked as a crop consultant/researcher was perfect for growing high sugar and starch crops. It made perfect sense to me as a plant scientist. Correspondence and journal articles from forage scientists confirmed this.
The local vets were not helpful, so I had to learn how diagnose and treat my horses. I drove to a university library, booked a hotel room, and spent 5 days copying papers to take home. Over the next months I studied those papers, and continued to correspond with academics specializing in carbohydrates in forage and animal nutrition. I bought leading textbooks on both subjects.
That’s when I realized that while forage scientists were bragging about the increased levels of sugar they were breeding into new grass species, the equine nutritionists were saying that hay is mostly fiber and cannot have enough sugar in it to founder a horse. That’s when I started my educational campaign. Over the next decade, I wrote articles in veterinary journals, did cooperative field studies with academics, spoke at a lot of veterinary and nutrition conferences, wrote a few book chapters and lectured all around the world.
I used what I learned to create a lower sugar diet for my horses. They both went back to work and the local vets were amazed.
This website is to share with you what I learned, and am still learning, so you can help your horses, too.
