Hi everyone! I was wondering if any of you use essential oils on your horses and if so, how? I know there are tons of uses but I haven’t researched much about using them with horses yet. I’d love to hear what oils are good and what you find to work.
Essential oils are having a moment again. They are being marketed with absurd over promises for use on people and there is a big multi level marketing scam going on with oils ( all mlm is a scam).
That means it’s important to sort out the reality from the hype.
I’m amused this has suddenly gone mainstream since essential oils and associated magical thinking were a staple of alternative hippy health food stores and lore for decades.
How do oils work on people? A certain amount of their effect if any has to do with emotional responses to smells.
Animals have far more sensitive noses than people and rely on their noses to understand the environment. Also they have different emotional responses than people. So while humans might find lavender calming, IME a horse finds the sight and smell of horsey friends the most calming thing.
Obviously some plant products such as mints and menthol and eucalyptus are useful ingredients in topical treatment for mild muscle pain and work as counter irritants.
Citronella was the active ingredient in grooming products before silicon conditioners, and in flyspray before current formulations.
Tea tree oil has antiseptic qualities.
If I need to use a product with a strong smell on a horse for real medical or grooming reasons of course I go ahead and do it. But I wouldn’t use them for atmosphere or relaxation because I am just needlessly disrupting my horses interaction with the world.
That said you might sometimes want to. The old trick of putting vicks vapor rub on a stallions nose so he can’t smell mares could also be done with a pungent essential oil. So there may be cases where deliberately blindfolding the horses nose does help them relax.
Some people also deliberately introduce a signature scent into massage or grooming sessions so that horses come to have a positive connotation with that smell.
I just rely on them being able to smell me.
I’ve also noticed that strange horses tend to love me when I am wearing barn clothes saturated with the presence of my big skanky friendly confident boss mare. Other horses love her and apparently like me by association! I think they can surely tell a horse person from an outsider this way. So I don’t wear perfume to the barn.
As far as thinking that essential oils might cure a real problem such as colic or laminitis or a systemic infection, that would be very foolish and dangerous to believe. Horses crash and die very fast and every hour that delays real vet care increaes the chance of a bad outcome.
So no, I don’t have much use for essential oils around horses except to the extent they are part of a topical formulation.
And indeed I don’t have much use for them in people either these days. Though I did have a backpacking world traveller phase in the hippypunk 1980s that involved a certain amount of patchouli and lavender oil. At which my fully adult self cringes.
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I love the Equaderma products, which use essential oils. The fly spray works and doesn’t have a scary warning label. Seriously, what is with the fly sprays that you are not supposed to get on your skin?!
I personally use essential oils for fragrance in skin care and around my house because many perfumes and added fragrances give me a headache or skin sensitivity. But I still like to smell good 
I have not noticed a difference with any horse depending on what oil I have on. So I don’t think lavender is going to magically chill out a high strung horse or anything like that.
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Essential oils are today’s snake oil. They have minimal benefit, typically for topical uses, and are incredibly expensive and over-hyped. And they have been shown to be potentially toxic to numerous animals recently, particularly house pets.
Save your money for something that actually works, unless you just like the smell.
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Yup. Forgot that bit about animal toxicity.
I see also that the OP joined today presumably just to ask this very vague question. My first step was to hit her way page link and I didn’t see any immediate evidence that she was selling essential oils.
However I do still wonder if that’s the agenda here.
It would be useful if OP could return and clarify why she is asking this question and what ailments she wants to treat.
It’s also important to stress that true essential oils are highly concentrated and can be irritating or toxic undiluted. Just because plant extracts can function in an intelligently formulated commercial product doesn’t mean that it’s safe to use the undliluted version directly. Tea tree oil being a case in point.
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I’d put essential oils in the same “therapy” bucket as magnets or copper bracelets
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Yes, with the caveat that a number of plant based extracts are used effectively in recipes for products.
This however is completely different from how essential oils are being marketed today, in ways that are misleading, fraudulent, and dangerous to both people and animals.
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While I agree with a lot of what you said… I sometimes use a horse bodyworker who is all into the DoTerra oils, and I sort of roll my eyes while she is dousing the horse with various concoctions at the end of the session. HOWEVER, I had her working on my 17H gelding and he was getting uncharacteristically bullish and fidgety, and mashed me into the fence and tried to walk over me a few times. She put a little lavender oil on his nose, and he immediately turned into a lamb for the rest of the session.
The one oil I use on myself for muscle soreness is Palo Santo, which I was introduced to by a holistic vet that used it on my horse’s hocks. I don’t like the smell, but find real relief from muscle knots, and will sometimes use it on my horses when I think they are or will be sore.
With other oils, I’ll let the horse sniff it, and will only use it if they seem interested in the oil. What they like changes from day to day.
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Yes I wonder if putting any scent at all on the nose could block out sensory input and calm a horse? Or distract him? As far as a topical use, I imagine your Palo Santo has a counter irritant effect? I find counter irritants like tiget bslm or horsey blue lotion very effective on my own muscle knots!
I am simply just curious about uses for horses since I’ve heard so much lately about uses for everything else. I have heard you can make your own fly sprays that are not toxic with essential oils. Has anyone tried that with any luck? I know sometimes the natural stuff doesn’t work like the stuff loaded with chemicals.
Well, citronella oil was the go-to fly spray before the modern formulations.
There are a lot of threads on here about home made fly sprays. In general, no they aren’t as effective in heavy fly conditions, and they don’t last as long. On the other hand, folks often report insects that don’t respect any spray on the market.
However, you want to check the toxicity of the essential oils as well. I am not finding any vet statements on toxicity to horses, and since horses don’t lick themselves as intensively as cats and dogs, there might be less risk. I found this vet website for cats and dogs:
http://www.vmdtoday.com/news/are-essential-oils-harmful-to-cats-and-dogs
As I said before, lots of plant compounds have topical effects and are part of commercial formulas that we could also replicate at home, if we had confidence in the strength and contents of the plant extracts we were using.
But I don’t think aromatherapy per se is going to work on horse like it does on people.
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Agree with much of the above statements. Topically, I love essential oils for my horse (and myself). But there are MANY ways to use them correctly and incorrectly.You have to do your own research on proper dilutions, photosensitivity, toxicity, quality, etc. I use them in my homemade coat conditioners, fly sprays and treatments.
My horse also loves the smell of peppermint and lavender, she gets all kissy and cuddly (more so than she already is lol) so I will usually put some on my neck or wrists when I am working with her, for no real reason other than she likes the smell and it’s cute to see her act like a cuddly baby.
All that being said, for the benefits of true aromatherapy (lavender for calming, for example) for horses isn’t the same as it is for people. And they CANNOT heal medical issues. Please, if your horse has ulcers or whatever issue the essential oil is saying it can fix, get a vet out. Rubbing an essential oil on their tummy is not going to heal them. Also, do not use them internally on any animal.
I recommend learning how you can incorporate essential oils into your grooming products (perhaps a couple drops of cedarwood in your coat conditioner, etc.) and using them for yourself if you like them.
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I also believe some oils will test positive on drug tests! I know up in Canada, peppermint and I believe lavender are big no no’s (plus whatever’s in the veteolin lineaments)
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Just give me the drugs my vet prescribes. If you want to use essential oils, use them in conjunction with prescription drugs. There is no substitute for Bute and Banamine, the 2 drugs everyone should have on hand.
One of my horses had to have a stint on dilaudid last fall! Show me an essential oil that is as powerful as that for pain.
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They are ALL loaded with chemicals - natural and otherwise. You and I are made entirely of chemicals. Chemicals make up everything around us. Whether a product works or not, or is safe or not has no correlation to whether it is natural or not. So when I see someone selling a product that says it is safe because it is natural, I wonder what other claims they are lying about.
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Yes I have used EOs on my horses… if you would like to learn more about how to use the oils for yourself, your horses, your dogs, cats and yes even chicken there are plenty of Facebook groups that you can join that would be willing to help you…and teach you all the ways that you can use essential oils.
And they will also happily sell you those same oils. Please be careful and do a google search for some information from sources that are not selling EO. There are known toxicities to domestic animals with many of the oils.
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Exactly.
Some of the claims made for essential oils by people who lack a basic understanding of human anatomy and physiology are breath taking.
Now I assume most use of essential oils in humans is at bottom aromatherapy and works on an emotional level. Scent is a very primal emotional trigger. This is fine because many many human ailments have a strong emotional component or are psychosomatic. This doesn’t mean imaginary. It means symptoms caused by mental state.
If you find a scent that is personally calming absolutely it can help symptoms associated with stress or anxiety such as head ache back spasms stomach problems. Scents can also block other odors you find distressing like your neighbors cooking. Scents make many people feel clean. Also private to the extent you are cocooned in your own scent bubble. Combined, these can create a feeling of being safe and being in control of your immediate environment which are powerfully positive emotional states. But obviously you don’t need essential oils for this. You could spray the curtains with Chanel No. 5 if that was something that you had a strong positive connection with. Or put a load of bread in the oven. Etc.
I would hope that humans using perfume to relax would of course be alert enough to go to ER if the symptoms got out of control and wouldn’t sit home with meningitis or appendicitis or gallstones etc.
The limits to using aromatherapy tailored to horses is that first, they rely on their noses to understand the world. Second, their noses are so sensitive that they could be overloaded. Third, horses do have a bundle of anxiety disorders like cribbing but what calms them most is the sight sound smell and presence of other horses. Horses want to smell their neighbors, don’t want privacy, and don’t care about being clean.
Fourth, some oils are toxic if ingested or caustic in their pure form and may be fine to dribble on light bulbs but not to apply to an animal.
Finally and really important, if you think you can use magic perfume to cure a serious acute illness of unknown cause like colic you are risking killing your horse. The horse cannot say: this is starting to feel really serious, get me to ER.
I have to say I loved essential oils, scented candles, and incense in my 20s. I associated incense with relaxing and doing something nice for myself, and I wore various hippy head shop oils. I didn’t think anything was curative though.
But for a long time now I’ve preferred to smell the natural world around me whether that’s spring air or clean sheets or horses.
I expect that essential oils mass marketed are doing some of the job of air fresheners in a culture that loves fake smells. You get to impose an artificial one note odor and call it natural.
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We’ve used an equine massage therapist who uses them as part of her program. I’ve used massage therapists before that didn’t. The results from each were about the same. So from my perspective there was no benefit and no harm. Being a neutral, I won’t pay for them. Nor will I demand they not be used.
G.
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If the oils relax the massage therapist and help her concentrate that is maybe a net benefit!
