> I have been using corn oil for weight on my horses for > years when needed. I recently read in a magazine that > this is harmful as the horse does not have a gall > bladder to digest the oil. I am now using black oil > sunflower seeds which contains Omega 3 which they > love. I have also used weight gain products markets > for this. Please help me with this.
It's true that horses don't have a gall bladder, but all a gall bladder does is *store* bile---it doesn't produce it. Bile is produced in the liver and horses do that just fine, in a continuous trickle. So horses do very well digesting dietary fats (regardless of the source, including corn oil), but the small intestine is fairly easily overwhelmed with too much fat at once, because they don't have a bucket of bile on standby in the gall bladder as other episodic-feeder species do. That isn't harmful, either, it just means that some fat will travel downstream undigested and be passed out in the feces. Depending on the oil source, the amount fed, and how adapted the horse is to added fats, there's some chance that a lot of fat could contribute to some loose poop, possibly some inconsequential decrease in fiber digestion and things like that. None of it harmful---at most, mildly annoying. One of the standard race track practices is to tip a pint
of linseed oil (one of the more cathartic fat sources) down through an NG tube before a race to create some fairly spectacular projectile diarrhea and thus loss of "bowel ballast".
You can pretty much ignore any of the recommendations associated with whatever source this warning originated from. It's just more nutritional terrorism from someone with apparently time on their hands, but very little actual knowledge.
