Bloated horse

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Cinderellarockafella

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Once my horse goes onto the grass from spring to autumn she badly bloats and is quite uncomfortable. She is filling with a lot of gas and I am worried about it developing into tympanic colic. I have tried her on protexin and activated charcoal and neither have had any effect. I give her a net before she goes out so she hasn't got an empty belly to help prevent gorging. I have been introducing her slowly from her winter to summer field. I am on a livery yard so she will not be able to stay on the winter grazing much longer. Does anybody have any ideas?
 
Cinderellarockafella said:
Once my horse goes onto the grass from spring to autumn she badly bloats and is quite uncomfortable. She is filling with a lot of gas and I am worried about it developing into tympanic colic. I have tried her on protexin and activated charcoal and neither have had any effect. I give her a net before she goes out so she hasn't got an empty belly to help prevent gorging. I have been introducing her slowly from her winter to summer field. I am on a livery yard so she will not be able to stay on the winter grazing much longer. Does anybody have any ideas?
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I first had this problem with my 16year old WB gelding in 2004 after moving to a yard which had change of use from a dairy farm. The grass is very rich, and good quality and he found it too much for his poor stomach to cope with. Bailey was getting colics so often that I stopped ringing the vets and on their advice would just give him 2-3 bute and put him on the walker for 20 mins before putting him back in his stable to monitor him and to see if it would develop into colic, and it never did thank goodness. There were a couple of scary times before this, once when he had to be tubed and they symphoned all the liquid grass out of his stomach, and another time when we arrived at a show and he was grunting and pawing at soil and eating the soil like it was something very tasty - that worried me and I had the emergency vet out who said the soil eating was like the equivalent of us taking antacid tablets, and in the wild this is what horses do when they have colic.

As it was always the same type of bute, ie gassy spasmodic colic the vets were happy to let me but him and deal with the colic myself, they feel I am knowledgable and sensible enough to know when to call them. Of course I do worry that I will one day miss something, but at the time he was getting the repeated gassy colics it would have cost me on average £250 month for the vets visits! Of course I am sensible enough to know when I need to call the vet out and wouldn't hesitate to do so should I need them.

Luckily for us both, his last colic was August 2011 and I had to get the vet then, but touch wood he's been ok since. He ocassionaly is quiet, and bloated looking and I will exercise him or lunge him to get teh gas out, again this is on vets advice. He is fed a scoop of pink powder once a day, and when its been raining after a warm spell (which the yard owner and I have worked out is the danger period for him) he is fed 3 pink powder scoops in his feed.

I did try putting a muzzle on him but he was very clever at getting rid of it, and then would gorge himself and get colic anyway. In the end it was trial and error that led me to gradually increase turn out from a couple of hours to three to four over a fortnight, very gradually increasing time out to allow his gut time to adapt. He is presently out for about 7 hours a day, and soon hopefuly will be out overnight when the grass will be less likely to cause too many problems. He is in a paddock which is about 2 acres and is split in half. I am thinking of fencing a little off so he has even less than this in case the weather turns worse and the grass is even richer!

The vet did say the colics could have been due to him having a redworm burden, and wanted to do an investigation, but I didn't want to open up a 'whole can of worms' pardon the pun, - once the insurance company get wind of colic and if he ever needed a colic op I most probably wouldn't be covered, so I declined. We are due to get a worm count done soon, so it will be very interesting to see if he does have a redworm burden still.

I would say to recap, the transition time is most important. Increase turn out by a couple of hours every ten days, or so. When you think about how you are meant to add new food to a horses diet over a period of a week to ten days, so must you with grazing if you have a horse that is in anyway susceptible to colic.
 
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Hi

Thanks for the info, that really helps. Funnily enough my horse is also on ex dairy pasture and it is just to rich for her. I have been long reigning her at trot in the evening and it does seem to help. I just hope it passes after the spring flush. She is young and could perhaps grow out of it, but I am looking for other livery yards where the horses stay on the same fields winter and summer as I think she will cope better with gradual growth. I am sure I have some fennel teabags in the cupboard, I will give them a go.

Really appreciate the help and its good to hear how others cope with it.
 
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