Horse eating manure why

Thank you for including the point that all of the horses mentioned in your query came from the same feeding program. Though this is interesting, it is impossible for me to determine if this historical common denominator has anything at all to do with the current behavior. Subscribe to Equinews and get the latest equine nutrition and health news delivered to your inbox.

Sign up for free now! Search Library Entire Site. Library Section Only. Everything Except Library. Presented by. Horses should eat many small meals several times a day. Sometimes they eat more than the forage and grain we provide for them. You are probably familiar with horses eating weird things like wood. But they also like to eat their pooh, properly known as feces.

Although it is a yucky subject, there are some reasons behind horses doing this. In the animal kingdom, numerous species eat their feces. Horses generally only eat their feces when they are two to three weeks old. David Ramey, DVM, states this on his website ,. The scientific word for eating feces is called Coprophagy. The need to eat feces dissipates as horses age.

However, it is not uncommon to see an adult horse eating feces. There are multiple reasons for this. Some explanations will require a veterinarian examination, and others you should be able to address yourself. Typically, horses eating feces is not dangerous.

We often have enquiries from anxious owners asking why their horse has suddenly been seen eating horse droppings. So why are they eating the manure then? We may need to look at human research and human poo to find the answer! If we consider the latest human research, we now know that an adult consists of approximately 10 trillion human cells 1.

But did you know that the same person consists of an estimated trillion bacterial cells. Did you know you can send off a sample of your poo and a swab of cheek cells from inside your mouth to the British Gut Project, and they will run an analysis to determine what are the main types of bacteria living inside your digestive system, a comparison with other people who have also sent samples, and some trends linking certain bacteria or the lack of to various diseases.

Research also shows that any change of diet will affect the bacteria in the gut, with some diets such as a highly processed Western junk food diet driving bacterial patterns that are associated with diabetes, metabolic syndrome and obesity, whilst other diets such as healthy organic fruit and vegetables driving an increase in our guts of the type of bacteria that are associated with lean, healthy, fit people.

Eat healthily and you will have a healthy spread of gut microbes, but fall back into eating chemically processed, preservative laden, high sugar ready meals and within as little as ten days, your gut microbes reflect what you are eating — ie back to those strains associated with ill health and degenerative diseases. This imbalance is called dysbiosis. The results are remarkable — google faecal transplantation and read for yourself 3.

So how does this relate to horses? Research into the horse microbiome has only just scratched the surface compared to human research but it is taking place with some interesting results.

Horses are hindgut fermenters, relying on a massive fermentation vessel called the cecum about two and a half black water buckets in size in a large horse and this is full of microbes breaking down fibre, making vitamins, controlling the metabolism and innate immune system.

What an amazing fact! Without a doubt, your horse is actually more bacteria than horse! Latest research in horses has shown certain types of bacterial strains found in their guts linked to laminitis, colic and other diseases 4. Here at Thunderbrook, our own in house research finds higher levels of certain types of bad bacteria linked to eating processed horse feeds with particular waste by product ingredients and pesticide residues.

So, if we compare with our knowledge from human research, horses on healthy natural diets that they evolved to eat will most likely have a different pattern of bacterial strains living in their guts, compared to horses fed highly processed feeds and forages. So is it natural for a horse to eat other horse poo? When a foal is born its digestive tract is sterile — no bacteria are present.

A foal now has to build up that community of good bacteria with a smaller proportion of bad bacteria — there will always be some around that will ferment the fibre in forage and feed, generate the nutrients, vitamins and play other essential roles such as controlling the immune system and metabolism.

Studies in human babies show it takes up to three years for the correct balance of good bacteria to populate the human gut 5. Exactly the same is true of foals. It takes up to a year or longer for the foal to establish a balanced gut flora of healthy gut microbes.