Re: psyllium for sand

[Susan Evans Garlinghouse <suendavid@worldnet.att.net>]

Cheryl Newbanks wrote:
> 
> That makes sense Sue.  I rarely ever psyllium Blue but I do fecal sand
> tests and he is always clear and I live in Sahara like conditions!!!!  But
> he does have free choice hay all the time and has a regular conditioning
> program.  When I do psyllium him once every 3 months or so I double the
> dose 2x's a day, but I doubt if that even does any good.  I read somewhere
> in the past year that forage was the thing that actually clears the sand
> out, and to make sure your hay is cut long stems too, because short stems
> don't clear out the digestive tracks like long ones do.  Something about
> them length of hay dragging through the system.  It may of even been one of
> your posts that mentioned this.  But it seems to work.


You might have heard it from me or another source, but in either case,
it was based on some research that measured the amount of sand removed
from the digestive tract as a result of either psyllium, mineral oil,
short-stem (pelleted) hay or long stem (flake) hay.  Of the four
treatments, long stem hay moved the most sand---in other words, what
most people do every day to just nourish their horses is also moving the
sand out more than anything else.  However, the amount of psyllium used
in this study was closer to what most people would consider a
"preventative" dose, not the therapeutic doses Heidi described.

However, this brings up another interesting question about using really
large amounts of psyllium---and I honestly don't know whether this would
be a concern or not, but it WAS interesting.  I was talking to our
college's ruminant nutritionist and univeristy DVM and they were telling
me that feeding a product similar to psyllium to cows can cause abomasum
displacement---that is, one of the four chambers of the cow's stomach is
literally buoyed upwards, causing a problem somewhat like a twisted
gut.  It requires surgery in cows to fix the problem.  However, I'm not
a DVM and don't pretend to be, so this is totally out of my line.  I
don't know if such a thing is even possible, let alone likely, in the
cecum of the horse.  Even if it was, I guess therapeutic doses of
psyllium under a vet's supervision would still beat a bunch of sand in
the hindgut---I DO know of one horse at least that had sand in the gut
that was responsible for causing a twist when the horse rolled.

Ah well, just another .02.

Susan Garlinghouse