My senior horse struggles with FWS too, albeit mild compared to some other cases. I do believe beet pulp has helped. He gets a forage only diet now and Unbeetable Feeds makes “Unbeetable Forage Only” pellets which contains beet pulp, alfalfa, and flaxseed oil. It doesn’t need to be soaked so it’s good for those horses who don’t like wet feed. Tractor Supply and Chewy carry it.
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The weather has gotten a little cooler so I added in some soaked alfalfa/timothy cubes. I am still feeding him his usual very fine timothy/OG hay. That does seem to have helped with the runny bouts that he was having. Today TSC had the Unbeetable total forage and I bought a bag of that to try to add to the mix of hay and ration balancer and decrease some hay since somebody here suggested that beet pulp helped their horse. If he doesn’t like it the equine garbage can will clean it up.
Update for anyone struggling with fecal water problems who comes across this thread.
He’s now back to having a clean butt. Hooray! After trying a lot of things what seems to have made the biggest difference is adding beet pulp shreds. Why adding 4 cups of beet pulp shreds when he gets TC Senior Gold which has quite a bit of beet pulp would make such a difference is a mystery to me.
It’s possible that time to adjust to Prascend or being off of the Firocoxib made the biggest difference, but I’ll continue to feed the beet shreds. Now to experiment with incorporating the Firocoxib back since he felt so much better with it but watch very carefully for any signs of stomach troubles.
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The old bags of beet pulp used to say that a benefit from using it was you had less volume of manure and it was smaller and drier when you fed beet pulp. So it makes sense that it would dry out the manure somewhat and thus help control fecal water and runny poop. Not sure what the newer bags say. Pony is eating his Unbeetable and he seems to be better but I don’t know how much is due to soaked hay cubes and how much is due to Unbeetable.
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