>Just a little personal experiment with
beetpulp. I wanted o >know if beetpulp would help hold sand suspended
in water, >thinking that if it did so in a glass jar it might work the
>same way in the horse. I put a pint of water in a clear >glass jar,
added about 1/2 cup of dry beetpulp, then about >2 tablespoons of sand.
I shook the jar well. Within
>moments, all of the sand had settled
to the bottom of the >jar. I repeated the shaking of the jar & the
sand sank >every time. Perhaps beetpulp does not move
the sand >out of the horse. I'll try the same thing with bran and with
>psillium
No, beet pulp does not "hold" sand. But in
the hindgut, neither does psyllium and bran doesn't do a thing. When you
espouse the theory that psyllium somehow surrounds a particle of sand and thus
floats it out of the hindgut, you're assigning some sort of intelligence to the
psyllium so that it somehow knows the difference between a particle of sand and
a particle of anything else. Doesn't happen. Same with beet
pulp---much as I love beet pulp, I just can't manage to assign it an
IQ.
As I explained in another post, what moves sand
from the hindgut is *peristalsis*, and what triggers that is either a) filling
the stomach so the stretch receptor triggers release of the hormone motilin,
and/or b) exercise. You can fill the stomach with pretty much anything,
but feeds that swell a bit after ingestion and thereby stretch the stomach a bit
more than other feeds are going to produce a better motilin release.
There's nothing magical about psyllium or beet pulp in the way that they move
sand---for that matter, they don't ever get into the same neighborhood as the
sand, since both are very well fermented, digested and absorbed in the small
intestine and cecum, so virtually none will ever see the hindgut where the sand
is. Also, people talk about how they fed such and such and lo and behold,
the horse pooped and moved out a ton of sand. Great. But it takes
24-48 hours for that psyllium or beet pulp to make it from the stomach to the
hindgut---so it's not psyllium/beet pulp IN the hindgut that makes a
difference---it's the stretching of the stomach that triggers the motilin
release that moves the hindgut that moves the sand.
Want to increase the benefit of it---go out and
ride your horse at an easy trot for a long time. The gut never moves
better than at about 20% VO2max.
Forget about bran doing ANYTHING for gut motility,
at least any more so than any other feed occupying the same volume of
space. It's a common mistake that because bran does wonders for the HUMAN
digestive system, it must do the same thing for horses. It doesn't.
Humans don't have a functional cecum, but horses' cecums work just fine and all
that bran will never get within shouting distance of the colon where the sand
is.
Hope this clears it up.
Susan G