Sheath cleaning is definitely not the most pleasant thing to do. You should know though it is essential for your stallion’s/gelding’s health and well – being and it must be done regularly. Breeding stallions are usually pretty well looked after and have their genitals cleaned regularly. In my opinion geldings are the ones often having problems.

Dirty sheath may cause your horse a lot of problems and pain, not to mention that it really smells! It depends on an individual horse how often you will have to do it. Some horses are fine if you do it every 6 – 8 months, some of them may need cleaning every 3 – 4 months. Don’t get too keen though and clean your horse’s sheath too often as that may affect the population of small microorganism living there and you may upset a good balance.

All dirt and excretions are called smegma. If the big lump of smegma hardens and collects inside of a horse’s penis, it is called “a bean”. It is extremely painful and can cause serious health issues including problems with urinating or even blockages. To be honest I think beans are actually life – threatening. If a bean is very big, you may need to sedate a horse to remove it as it is very irritating and painful. If you see your stallion or a gelding to kick at its belly, hold a leg up while urinating, display soreness in the hindquarters – it may be a sign its sheath needs cleaning or – unfortunately – there is already a bean formed.

For your own convenience and safety you should make sure your horse is used to having his penis cleaned. If you don’t know what his reaction can be, try to hose him gently with a water. Start with front legs, move on to hind legs, gently hose his belly, move to groins and then slowly towards penis. If a horse doesn’t seem to object the procedure, you can expect he will not cause you major problems when you actually try to clean his sheath. Most likely though he may be worried and a bit anxious. Don’t get frustrated! For a horse it is a natural self – defence, he is worried about his body. If your horse is afraid of water (or a hose), try to gently rub the sheath to encourage a horse to drop its penis. If a horse allows you, you may try to reach gently into a sheath, grab a penis and slowly ease it out.

Every horse if correctly handled and re – assured, in my opinion will be fine with cleaning its sheath. Once they find out it is actually quite relaxing and pleasant, they usually don’t mind. Remember once they are relaxed, they may help you and just drop their penis down. My horse was really anxious to start with and tried to kick several times. Although he used to race, I think his sheath was never taken care of – it was so disgusting and dirty! I started with sponging him gently around sheath, then sponging outside of his sheath and then one day just decided to risk it and clean it all out.

Cleaning

You will need a cleaning product of your choice, latex gloves (recommended!) and some lubricant – and please have your nails short, bucket of water if necessary. Work your hand up into a sheath and rub a gel/foam gently. Remember to be thorough and remove all debris. The more you remove, the more likely your horse will avoid problems. Afterwards always make sure you remove all the cleaning products with water!

Products

You can use lots of different products to clean a sheath as there is a lot of good quality products available everywhere. My two choices are:



Main points to remember:
Make sure you clean your horse’s sheath regularly to avoid problems.
Use only gentle products and make sure you wash them all away with water.
Try to make your horse used to having its genitals touched and handled and you will save yourself a lot of troubles.
Always be very patient and very gentle when cleaning horse genitals.
If you have any doubts or concerns, call your vet!

7. Swede - to feed or not to feed?

Swede – also called rutabaga or yellow turnip – is a root vegetable easily found in every supermarket or a local shop (and it’s also pretty cheap!). Some people are not sure if swede actually can be fed to horses. The answer is: IT CAN!

Most horses absolutely love swede. My horse before devouring it, plays with it and kicks it like it was a ball. It keeps him busy and happy. Some horses will just play with it and eat it if we put it in a stable or on a field. Some of them may feel a bit insecure or worried about big, round “thing” and in that case it’s easier to cut it in pieces and put it in a bucket or mix it with feed. If you want to provide your horse some fun and activity in a stable, the good idea is to hang a swede on a rope and safely tie in up in a stable. It will prevent boredom and keep horse amused. Well unfortunately some horses will play with it for hours, the cheekier (or greedier) ones may easily find the way to snap it in pieces and eat it with ease.

Swede added to a feed may also encourage a horse to eat its food. A piece of swede is also – in my opinion – a much better treat than sugar cube or a mint. Always remember to cut swede into strips not chunks (to avoid choking) if you want to put it into a feed.

6. Echinacea for horses

Echinacea is a herbal plant known also as a coneflower. And just because it’s a herb, we tend to forget that it’s one of the strongest and most effective booster of immune system as it actives white blood cells. The better the immune system works, the quicker horse body will handle infections. Echinacea also acts anti – inflammatory, antiseptic, antiviral and anti – bacterial. It encourages wound healing and can help with skin conditions such as burns or insect bites. Not to mention it can relieve respiratory tract problems such as cold or cough.

Some people don’t believe in power of herbs. I agree it takes time for herbal products to work and for us to see results. It can take up to few months. I’m not trying to encourage you to over – supplement your horse but just trying to give you ideas what to do when a problem occurs. If you know that your horse is particularly weak, older, recovering from a surgery or in high risk of becoming ill, I’d personally consider supporting its body. My friend’s competition horse is currently on box rest recovering from a surgery. As her food and grazing are restricted and she’s still very weak and prone to infections, my friend decided to support her immune system with Echinacea (she anyway hardly gets any supplements apart from biotin and soya oil). Let’s be honest when a horse is recovering, the last thing we want is some nasty infection. I’m watching my friend’s mare carefully and must admit she is looking very well and quite happy.

You can buy horse version of Echinacea supplements online:

http://www.nutrecare.co.uk/latest_detail.asp?prod_id=3297&id=&grpid=3297&msg=&offset=12

http://www.feedem.co.uk/horse-117/horse-care-supplements-147/naf-products-137/echinacea-liquid-supplement-1307.htm

http://www.orchardequestrian.com/cart.php?target=product&product_id=4248&substring=echin

These supplements are pretty expensive. You can try to substitute them with a human version of Echinacea supplements which you can probably get from your local health store. In both cases always CAREFULLY READ THE LABEL, don’t overdose, if you have any doubts speak to your vet.

5. Mint in horse diet

We all know the lovely, strong smell of mint. Mint is well – known for its excellent aroma and healing power. It helps to soothe the digestive system and ease stomach aches. It’s very commonly used in industrial purposes like for example in mouth freshening products. It can cure seasonal cough or cold and also remove excess of heat from a body.

Horses love taste of mint too! Just to mention their favorite polo mints and other mint flavored treats. Adding special mint supplement to your horse’s diet can be quite beneficial. Apart from giving the food a very pleasant aroma and encouraging even shy or fussy eaters to try their food, it can also help to relax the muscles of a digestive tract therefore actually encourage the good health of a digestive system. It helped me to encourage my horse to eat bran mash and readigrass (2 things he really dislikes!) while being on a box rest. I can highly recommend that product.

It’s a reasonably priced supplement. Of course introduce mint supplement in a diet gradually and do not overdose. You can get some mint supplements online here:

http://www.frogpool.com/product-753.htm

http://www.robinsons-uk.com/products/search.asp?keyword=crushed+spearmint

4. Osteoporosis

My non – horsey friend asked me once if such a problem as an osteoporosis existed in horses and ponies. Osteoporosis is the decrease of bone mineral density resulting in very fragile and prone to fractures bones. Bone density is a measurement of the level of minerals in the bones. Osteoporosis (similar to people) doesn’t have any specific symptoms because the main consequence is obviously increased risk of actual breaking a bone in a situation when a healthy, normal animal wouldn’t injured itself. Osteoporosis is usually associated with deficiency of calcium, phosphorus or vitamin D in a diet (see the article about skeletal system) but it can also be caused by poor diet in general. Osteoporosis isn’t a common disease in horses and sometimes it may be hard to prove it. However there’s a disease called osteopenia which includes lower bone density but not so low to classify it as osteoporosis. It’s more common.

3. Skeletal system - structure

Last time I focused on emphasizing the importance of maintaining health of our horse’s bones even though they’re not so visible like let’s say muscles or coat. They create a strong framework of a horse’s body and actually knowing how they are ‘set up’ within body can help to understand our horses good sides, limits and potential problems. As I said before it’s impossible to move certain bones excessively to get in a result a horse with a perfect conformation, proportions and extraordinary movement. We can shape muscles but we need to stick to “a set of bones” we are given.

It’s really interesting knowing where bones are positioned within a body. I did lots of stable management lectures for children, teenagers and adults. Sometimes we went into bigger details. It was really surprising for me to find out that people believed horse’s cervical (neck) vertebraes are on top of a neck (just where crest is). Usually people also thought scapula (shoulder blade) was much smaller and when pointing it they usually stayed very careful with showing boundaries of that big, powerful bone.

By knowing how the skeletal system is built and where bones are positioned and possibly how big (or small) they really are, we can save ourselves problems with just to mention fitting saddles, bandaging (unbelievably lots of people believe all lower leg is built up with bones and they don’t care about the way of applying the bandage either stable or exercise one), grooming and talking to a vet.

I don’t push anyone to know the names and location of all of the 205 bones within horses body (unless you really want to!) but some basic knowledge may always turn up to be extremely helpful. There’s 37 bones in a scull, 54 vertabreas, 1 sternum, 36 ribs, 40 bones in a forelimb and 40 bones in a hindlimb including pelvis. We can divide skeleton into 2 parts: axial skeleton includes skull, vertabreas, ribs and sternum. Appendicular skeleton includes bones of forelimbs and hindlimbs.

Next time you go riding, check if you can locate these on a real horse easily (and remember them too):

Maxilla – upper jaw
Mandible – lower jaw
Scapula – shoulder blade
Humerus – arm bone
Radius – forearm bone
Cannon bone (metacarpus)
Cervical vertabrea – neck bones (7)
Thoracic vertabrea (18)
Lumbar vertabrea (6)
Sacral vertabrea (5)
Coccygeal vertabrea – tail bone (15-20)
Sternum – breast bone
Ribs – 10 true (attached to sternum) and 8 false (not attached)
Femur – thigh bone (the largest bone within horse’s body)
Tibia – leg bone

Facts to remember:

axial and appendicular skeleton
femur the biggest bone

Extremely useful bookhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Horse-Anatomy-Pictorial-Approach-Structure/dp/0851317693

2. Skeletal system - introduction

Horse skeleton isn’t really something that would bother us in an everyday life. Set of bones put together in certain order, that’s all. We obviously start being more interested when let’s say injury, poor performance or problems with fitting tack occur. Why is it important then to know a bit about skeletal system of our horse even though an animal seems to be perfectly ok?

Skeleton system is vital. There’s approx. 205 bones to provide a good protection of internal organs and muscles within horse’s body and create a body structure (framework). Not to mention that they also support horse’s weight. Horse’s skeleton isn’t really something that we can easily change. We can affect horse shape by building up the muscles but we can’t directly change the shape or position of bones (just a quick word – in this case I’m excluding deformations, fractures or neglecting animals etc). We can make bones stronger and more resistant though. Poor bone quality will affect performance and horse wellbeing.

The basic and sufficient care for bones would include good stable management, sensible workload for a horse and providing enough calcium and phosphorus in a diet. We must remember that bone is a living organism and needs constant mineral supply. Therefore calcium and phosphorus are essential. Calcium can be provided by feeding leafy green foods like alfalfa. Phosphorus works closely with calcium and can be obtained from cereals. If you are concerned your horse isn’t getting enough minerals to support his skeletal system you may also add a limestone flour supplement to its diet. Remember to carefully read the label, not to overdose and if any doubts – talk to your vet.

You may find some limestone flour supplement online here:

http://www.baileyshorsefeeds.co.uk/whatproduct/supplements/lime.htm

http://www.naf-uk.com/products/detail.php?id=91

Facts to remember:

• approx. 205 bones
• protection, support, framework
• calcium and phosphorus are essential