Interesting…
The TC Senior has added protease and cellulase. Stomach Soother is loaded with papaya: http://www.stomachsoother.com/default.aspx
[QUOTE=SAndrocles;4545656]
IME the most overlooked thing for helping older horse to digest food and thus not get diarrhea, yet one of the easiest and most successful, is to supplement enzymes.
People tend to focus on probiotics but they only work on fiber in the hindgut. There is still the grain and the small intestine and the digestive action there is enzymatic. Some older horses have difficulty producing enough enzymes to process food correctly and absorb it.
I have found the simple addition of enzymes to be very successful. Accel is one supplement that has them but you could get them anywhere. Probably would need to feed more than what is in Accel anyway if that’s the problem. Look for amylase, protease, cellulase. Also papaya enzymes and bromelain I believe.
So - what is Stomach Soother?[/QUOTE]
Stomach Soother is 100% papaya Puree. When I called the company to see if they thought it might help my one horse with gas colic they told me it was human grade papaya puree and for human consumption just add a bit of water to thin it as it is a fairly thick puree.
I then tried to see if I could find papaya puree on line that might end a bit cheaper but what I got was considerably thinner than the SS so after that I stuck with SS.
So, considering that I’m currently feeding SS and Ration Plus (prebiotic) and soaked beet pulp and Safe Choice pellets(low starch), my horse should not have the runs, or loose and soft manure and probably should be impacted. :eek: :sigh: While I wouldn’t want the impaction, I’d sure like to see a complete and separate manure ball instead of semi-formed balls that go splat into one soft mushy and juicy pile that I am seeing. :sigh: 
softened water was the cause with my horse
This probably won’t be the case with any of your horses with the runs, but I went through this all winter long last year and couldn’t figure why. Nothing helped much, not even Biosponge.
Turned out the culprit was warm water. As soon as the temps dropped well below freezing I’d be carrying out buckets of warm water that I had filled up in the house. Never did it occur to me that the warm water runs through our water softening system and that precisely that was the cause. I’ve got heated water trophs outside, but hubby didn’t want me to use electrical waterbuckets in the stalls.
Only when the weather warmed up & I stopped giving them warm water from the house did he stop having the runs.
I completely forgot about this and mid-summer I started soaking his feed for unrelated reasons. Again not having my thinking caps on, I would soak it in warm water from the house, let it cool down & feed it to him. Within a week, the runs were back. I could hardly believe that just a total of max 6 quarts of watersoftened water could cause that to him, but it sure did. Stopped using the water from in the house and runs vanished.
Wanted to share this, just in case there’s more of you out there that give their horses softened water.
My other horse on the contrary never had any issues with it.
[QUOTE=BeastieSlave;4546095]
Interesting…
The TC Senior has added protease and cellulase. Stomach Soother is loaded with papaya: http://www.stomachsoother.com/default.aspx[/QUOTE]
That’s what I like about TC Senior, but in ‘severe’ cases I think you’d have to supplement even more, with ‘fresh’ enzymes.
Sort of an update - poop was a bit runnier this evening. Hmm, is that because she hasn’t has SS for a couple days? I gave her regular (increased) evening meal and then fed Candi a little extra TC sr with the SS. She seemed happy enough to eat it.
Just wanted to thank everyone who is contributing suggestions!! I have a 33 year old TB with enteroliths–for the past 2 years, he has had occasional bouts of diarrhea, but they’ve always resolved in a couple of days, at worst with a bit of Pepto Bismol. About two weeks ago, he started having terrible diarrhea, and I’m trying every suggestion on this thread!!! So far he flatly refuses to touch yogurt; SandClear appeared to work fabulously well for one day, but may have been just coincidence as it was only one day that was better; he will eat a bit of pumpkin but it doesn’t seem to help much. So, I’m glad that I at least have a long list of things to keep trying!
Pookah - you need to try flavored yogurt! 
:lol: No, not really but I do know of one person that said her horse liked the banana flavor or something like that.
I just started my poopy-boy on Bio-Sponge and since he had been doing a little bit better with the Stomach Soother, I added that as well. It was a tramatic day here in the first place with a nasty winter storm. I tried keeping the boys in but they would have nothing to do with that. Poopy-boy did nothing but scream that his buddy wasn’t there (he was 2 stalls away :eek:) and with the screaming came liquid manure. 
So, here’s hoping the Bio-Sponge and SS help him.
Went through this with an aging pony - diagnosed with all sorts of ailments. The answer was sand. We did a round of Sand Clear and viola. . . the runs left.
Thanks, msg, I may have to try that–actually, knowing this horse, he’s probably pissed that I bought the STORE brand, and not organic or otherwise special. No doubt he will decide he likes Greek yogurt or something that costs eight times as much :).
For those that have mentioned using Hay Stretcher, where are you buying it? I’m having no luck locally (I live in NC).
My Perch/X gets MSM, Glucosamine Sulfate +, Accel, give extra probiotics after worming, soak his feed, eats hay fine, gets psyllium for a week every couple of months, but the Bio Sponge (thanks CarolinaDreamin) seems to be helping! Will see in the long run (no pun intended).
I know I posted earlier about Paddy. I ended up switching his hay (the ProBios didn’t really help) to oat hay (not my first choice) and that cleared up the diarrhea problem.
vitamins
Last year we had a similar problem. We tried several things,first of all we tried a vermicide, but it dd not get better. But a feww days after the application of a special vitamin mixture (I dont remeber the name) we had the feeling it went a little bit better. Two weeks after almost everything was finde again.
Our 36 year old had the runs for years. He also had Cushings AND was pure white. Eeew, that long coat and white tail could get so gross. I did a few things to make him feel better (after the teeth/worms/etc inspections, of course). One was I trimmed up the underneath of the top of his tail, the way I do my event horses’ tails. Then I clipped the hair away from his bottom and greased him up with Vaseline regularly. Then I fed him Dengi
http://www.dengie.com/pages/feed-advice/feeding-the-older-horse-or-pony.php which is already partially ‘digested’ and much easier for old digestions. The real cure was that I fed him Purina Equine Senior(I don’t like any Purina products EXCEPT this one). http://horse.purinamills.com/products/Equine_Senior.asp
I soaked the feed in HOT water for about an hour before feeding him. It was a completely wet mush, wetter than oatmeal. He slurped it down like a champ and the runs went away. It was really quite amazing as he had been runny for 9 years!
As for Pro-biotics, they are NOT designed to be fed all the time. They are useful for short periods of time for specific reasons, not for full time feeding. If you can feed your mare more frequently, in smaller batches, you might get results. Also, I love the Stomach Soother. It is a great product with a wonderful company behind it. Best of luck, she’s obviously the love of your life!:sadsmile:
Just thinking about your old guy and wondering how he’s doing. Any updates?
SCFarm
LLDM, it’s funny that you asked for an update today–yesterday I did a search for this thread, to write down any ideas that I might have missed the first time around. I’ve suddenly been struggling with the same problem in my 33 year old (I guess 34, now) the entire month of December. He seems to get better every few days, and then worse again. After rereading the thread, I’m thinking that the most likely cause is the grass at this time of year, since it seemed so seasonal. He’s also really stopped eating his hay; he’s never been a good hay eater, but now he’s just picking through it. After exhausting my vet’s ideas, I started trying everything on this thread–I still offer him hay, but he’s now getting the bagged timothy and hay cubes. I’ve also tried soaked Senior, MSM, yogurt (wouldn’t eat it), pumpkin, worming again, etc. Next on my list are pre/probiotics, Dia-gel and HayStretcher. Any tips on where to find HS locally in NC? Though I haven’t yet found the cure for this guy, I really do appreciate all of the ideas posted on here–it’s such a frustrating problem to deal with–I can’t imagine euthanizing because of something like this, but I feel like I’m going to have to if I can’t get it resolved. My horse’s tummy is clearly bothering him–on bad days, you can literally hear his gut sounds from a few feet away. He does have enteroliths, so that’s probably a complicating factor. One other thing that I haven’t seen mentioned but do find helpful is that to at least help with the cleaning problem (I have limited hot water in the barn), I mud-wrap his tail in vetwrap for a few days when he’s having a tough time. Hate to do it to him, but it’s so hard to get out of his white tail, and it lets me avoid using cold water on him.
Ask your vet abot metronidazole. It works and is usually given for 10 days.
(Presuming it’s anaerobic bacteria in the gut.)
Well, we’re having mixed results too. Candi has been on MSM for a while now and at first I think it helped, but now I’m not so sure. She finished the Stomach Soother and I didn’t see any change afterward.
She has piles of well-formed poop, though they seem very hayish. She also has flat spats of poop that are like liquid hay. She’ll have both types in the same day. I have cut her down to one flake of hay at night so the rest must be coming from the grass. As I said, I won’t be able to eliminate all grass.
I have upped her TC Senior feed considerably and she seems to be holding her weight okay right now. She’s a bit leaner than I’d like, but she’s old, it’s winter, and she’s got diarrhea. I’m not complaining - except for the messy tail.
I’m thinking about adding beet pulp. The volume should keep her busy for a while and the water and calories won’t hurt. I won’t feed it instead of the TC, but rather as a less expensive supplement taking the place of hay. I know it’s not the same nutritionally, but her nutritional needs are met by the TC. Right?
We JUST figured it out today with our 12 year old gelding. Has always had the runs in the winter until we got our own place two years ago and then it miraculously cleared up. We thought it was our EXCELLENT care :lol: but this year we finally got the heated water tubs up and running and guess what-diarrhea again. Looking back, he’d always been boarded at places with heated water tanks and always had the runs. So, for him the culprit is also the warm water-any suggestions on how to counter this? More fiber to soak up the water? What is it about warm water vs cold water?
I had a similar issue with my older mare. She had the semi normal poop followed by liquid squirts. Her back end and and tail were a mess…
I decided to experiment a little. I gave her probiotics, but also gave her some chamomile for a few days. It works really well in humans for diarrhea. She cleaned up quite nicely! You’d have to be cautious, because you wouldn’t want to stop them up completely…Impaction in a horse is not a good thing… But a few days of a handful a day of bulk Chamomile seemed to do the trick for her. It also did not come back after I stopped…
As with all herbal remedies, use with caution!
as far as semi or even normal poop followed by liquid, that can be leaky gut or colonic ulcers. My horse always had what looked like a trail of brown/green down his butt- what only can be described as bile almost… it wouldn’t eat the skin too bad but it was a little irritated. I noticed after I moved him to another barn, actually heard him poop once, and itwas REALLY bad. as in a large splash at the end of the poop. I have tried multiple ulcer meds and remedies, to no avail- and there really isn’t a lot of things out there that will treat beyond the stomach.
I put him on papaya juice and hemp oil of all things- on the recomendation of a friend. The extra liquid cleared up. AND the occasional bloating I have seen on him has never returned. I have since taken him off and on of the hemp oil and it consistantly goes away or comes back with the hemp oil. As far as I’m concerned, he’s happy healthy on it, he’ll stay on it.
