Feeding egg yolks?

Does anyone feed a fresh egg yolk with their horse’s grain ?
I’ve never heard of this before and saw it on a horse’s stall card.
What are the benefits ?

No benefits, but it sure does bring the risk of salmonella.

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I heard this back in the age of dinosaurs. Supposedly feeding an egg helped put shine on a horse’s coat.

I personally don’t think an egg is going to make a horse shiny and agree with @JB that it’s more likely a hazard than a benefit

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As someone who has raised hundreds of birds, both for egg production and butchering, don’t. Don’t even feed raw eggs to your dogs. Salmonellosis is horrid for the infected horse, it can be spread to other horses and even humans.

Also, I’ve been around the block a bit in this industry, and this is the first time I’ve heard of this. Gross.

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it’s actually been a thing for a really long time :frowning:

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I’d hoped that people had moved on from feeding eggs but apparently not lol

Huh. The things you learn on the internet. The only egg/horse connotation I’ve ever heard is to stop rearing if a baseball bat wasn’t your jam.

Never tried either method by the way.

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I’m hoping it’s a regional thing. We always jump to oils and flaxseed for skin, coat, manes and tails.

Pretty sure I just heard this mentioned in a Dick Francis book I’m listening to…

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With the price of eggs nowadays and risk of salmonella I can think of a million better ways to accomplish whatever this is trying to accomplish :laughing:

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If I was a barn employee, I certainly would not want to be the person who has to fight with an egg to separate the yolk to feed it to your horse every day. Yuck.

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Not to mention a shot at other zoonotic disease like influenza, especially the one circulating in US bird flocks. Ugh.
The absolutely last thing we need is horses as potential vectors for human disease.

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I’m pretty sure you can’t get avian flu from eating an egg from a sick chicken (who likely isn’t laying anyway). If you were handling an egg with infected chicken poop on it, maybe, but then eww, please don’t do that anyway without washing your hands AND the egg LOL You can’t get the flu from eating something, it has to be breathed in. A horse would be far more likely to contract it (if it’s even possible, I don’t know that it is) from being around the chickens, than being fed an egg.

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As recommended particularly for hunters and race horses in “Cheap and Good Husbandry” by Gervase Markham, published in London in 1614. I certainly hope our knowledge of equine nutrition has moved on a bit since then…

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