My mare has had equine asthma for about 5 years now. Allergy testing has told us that primary triggers are mold and certain pollens. We manage with a mix of daily apoquel and steroids when there is a flare up. But it did necessitate the change from a show horse in a fairly heavy workload to a life where we do what she can when she can to keep her fit and happy. Effectively this means she is ridden 3-5x a week, sometimes this is ‘proper work’ other times it is a looong walk-only hack, sometimes it is something in between.
She is out 24/7 and has free choice access to both grass and orchard hay. She had been getting 1lb of the triple crown balancer a day. She also gets 1 flake of alfalfa a day because her pasture mate gets some and if she didn’t also, she would eat his. But over the winter she became chunkier than I’d like, and going to less than 1lb of balancer didn’t make sense nor did I want to limit forage. So, I pulled the balancer and switched her to 1lb of a hay stretcher pellet + vermont blend pro. Hay/grass set up unchanged. So far she’s done great with this switch and has slimed down a lot and is at a lean/healthy weight.
Interestingly an unexpected positive side effect has been that her breathing also seems much improved. This improvement started pretty instantly, so I don’t think it’s weight loss induced, though being a good weight certainly helps. It makes me think that her asthma might have been trigged by something in her feed.
The negative side effect is that when riding her energy has been low. When she was a performance horse, if her caloric intake was low, so was her energy and usually it meant she needed something upped. However, now I’m in a different situation. Normally I would just add back a bit of either the TC balancer or some of the TC senior my barn offers (1/4lb-1/2lb). But given the breathing improvement, I don’t want to do this. I don’t need her to be a fire breathing dragon or anything, but lack of energy when doing things she’s normally excited for, tells me something is not yet ideal in what she’s getting.
So, exploring some options and wanted to get thoughts from others.
Available at the barn: adding more hay stretcher (though i think this won’t necessarily get me what I need); adding beet pulp
Supplements (needs to be a dry/not liquid): finding a simple fat source (ground flax, etc); adding protein (tri-amino or something of the sort); something else???
