Carbos and innovation . . .

[Trishmare@aol.com]

Dear Tom,
     That was some, er, "discussion" y'all had going here on ridecamp the
other night!!!  It's been a long time since this particular list has been so
entertaining.  Last time I had this much fun, ridecamp was discussing guns . .
. 
      Ah well.  I've kept my mouth shut, and my fingers off the keyboard, as
long as I could stand . . . Tom, I've got unending respect for you, and for
the enlightenment your applied knowledge brings to the world, but I've got to
tell you, I think you were off-base calling Joe resistant to innovation.  As
you may or may not know, his career depends on his keeping UP innovation.  The
man makes his living using technology that didn't even exist a mere ten years
ago.   I would think that he'd apply this same forward thinking to his
relationship with horses and endurance riding as well.  The spectacular
success of his equine partner Kahlil, one of the living legends of this sport,
seems to attest to that.
     As far as the feeding discussion itself goes, I have neither your
research expertise, nor Joe, nor Heidi's hands-on experience.  So I am not
really qualified to comment.  However, as not being qualified to voice an
opinion on a subject rarely stops me from doing so, here goes:
     My horse David was at the racetrack for one summer.  He had INNUMERABLE
problems there, most of them related to how they were feeding him, and those
that were not nutrition related, were training related.  They all but force
fed my poor horse grain . . . sweetfeed . . . his trainer used to put cut up
apples and carrots in his grain to coax David into eating more, he could
rarely finish all they gave him.  I'd get up to the track and David would have
a feed bucket hanging in the stall with enough sweetfeed in it to kill a hog,
and one flake of alfalfa in the corner.  This is exactly opposite of how I
feed my horses, and of how David had been accustomed to being fed.  I feed
free-choice (or nearly so) grass hay, pasture, and a little bit of crimped
oats/corn.  Just enough to put the supplements in.  My horse Tash, whom I've
owned for over twenty years, is as healthy as a horse, always has been, and in
all those years I've seen two episodes of mild colic, both of which in my mind
were vaccination related.  Not feed.  Tash has been on more 50 mile rides than
I could count, but none were in competition.  He is 26, and still going
strong.
     Once I was FINALLY able to get the track people to start feeding David
the way I wanted him fed; lots of grass hay, get rid of all that dang
sweetfeed AND the alfalfa, which causes David to tie-up, a whole bucket load
of the problems we were having miraculously resolved themselves.  Took most of
the summer to get anyone there to listen to me though.  Who was I?  Some
backyard horse owner who didn't have a clue, seemed to be the standing
attitude.  Never mind that it was MY horse!!!
     In a recent article I wrote for Equus Magazine on chronic colic (July 98
issue) the main idea I got out of  the research I did for that article was
that a horse is NOT  a "meal-eating" animal, that is, his GI tract is not
designed to handle two or three large "meals" a day, as is the human and
canine GI tracts.  A horse is a GRAZING, and ROAMING animal.  He is designed
to digest small amounts of roughage . . . grass or grass hay, on a more or
less continual basis, and he is designed to be roaming around continually (not
locked in a stall) while he does this.  Both factors are significant; the
roaming, the movement, actually aids in the digestion of the food.  Grain is a
highly fermentable, concentrated food source which the equine GI tract is not
really designed to handle.
     As to Tom's assertion that "big bone is soft bone," well, there is some
evidence to support this, and the Akhal-Teke people could tell you about it;
however, this too, is relative . . . while "cold-blooded" horses tend to have
"big," and "soft" bone, the horses of the Turkomen tribesmen, and the Arabs,
have a much denser bone.  Mixes of cold and soft breeds . . . and most modern
sport horses are mixes, have bone somewhere in between.  A purebred Akhal-Teke
has the densest bone of any breed, although most Tekes do not have the 8" per
1000 lbs of body weight that is recommended.  Doesn't matter; the denseness of
the bone offsets this.  Arabian bone is not as dense as a Tekes, but more
dense than a TBs.  All this is generally speaking of course; there always will
be individual lines and individual horses which are exceptions.  Irregardless
of the bone, I think the gradually increasing stress loads encouraged by
endurance training are much better for a horse than "typical" track training;
horse is trotted for 5 minutes, breezed for a mile around the track for 2
minutes, put on the hotwalker for 15 minutes, then back in the stall for the
next 23 and1/2 hours.  I have never seen an endurance horse snap a cannon.  It
happened with regularity at the track.  

Trish & "pretty David"
Grand Blanc, Michigan