Health Concerns

Silver Lining Herbs

 

How a little herbal  treatment can help your horse

 

Mickey Young has a track record of success when it comes to horses. He’s an 11-time qualifier for the National Finals Rodeo as a rider, seven times as a stock contractor, and once as a pick-up man. And he attributes all of that to a personal philosophy: “You don’t rely on society to take care of you. You take care of yourself. We’ve got everything we need to do that.”

 

It’s a philosophy he got from his parents—along with the knowledge of how to use natural herbs to help sick animals. For years, folks came up to him, asking about herbal treatments for their horses. So in 1998, he put everything together and set up Silver Lining Herbs, based in Buhl, Idaho.

 

Mickey says the idea of herbal treatments is, well, natural.  “There are thousands of different kinds of plants. And each has different mineral constituencies. If that animal is able to access certain things, then their senses take over from there. An animal that is needing a certain kind of vegetation will find it.”

 

And sometimes they’ll find it in the strangest places.  “A few years ago, I was talking to a guy that trains race horses in Maryland. And he told me that from time to time he would have horses that would be prone to bleeding when he’d run them on the track. And he said if he took those horses home and turned them loose in his paddocks, they would eat all the poison ivy and poison oak they could get their lips on. And he said that would clean them up in just two or three weeks, and then he could bring them back and run them again without any bleeding.”

 

Now the Food and Drug administration bans the use of poison ivy and poison oak, but there are similar plants that can do just the same thing—and Silver Lining offers a product to do just that.

 

In fact, Silver Lining has 30 different products, each designed for a particular part of the horse’s body. “We’ve done the legwork to find out what is needed in certain situations,” Young says. “If people will tell me what the situation is, I can pretty much tell them the product that would be best to use.”

 

There’s even a Training Maintenance mix that works as a regular supplement. Like all of Silver Lining’s offerings, it comes in a powder form that can be mixed directly with feed (Mickey recommends grass hay or some kind of roughage), or with whole oats, a mix of water or apple cider vinegar.

 

So what kind of complaints does Young see most often?  “The kidneys are a big issue, and most times folks don’t know that. And when horse immune systems are compromised then they’re susceptible to whatever is out there.”

 

And he says you don’t need a vet or complex testing to tell if there’s a problem.  “Listen to the horse. If you’ll listen that horse will tell you what’s wrong,” Young advises.  “If there’s excessive urinating or they’re drinking a lot of water or tying up, those are the symptoms that come from kidneys not functioning properly, for example.”

 

Herbs, of course, are considered “nontraditional” medicine (which is sort of strange, considering they were used well before modern medicine was developed). But Young says that more and more vets are coming to Silver Lining. “Veterinarians are led to the practice of veterinary medicine because they want to help the animal. So they have the animal’s best interest in mind. They are only taught about certain things in veterinary school—they’re not taught about herbs. They’re not taught about nutritional needs. So it’s up to them to broaden their spectrum and look elsewhere at other medicinal avenues. From time to time, we’ve had veterinarians call us, and when they learn what we’re doing they are very good to embrace it and use it in their practice or refer people to us—even become distributors.”

Related posts:

1. Good Nutrition Supplement Choices of Top Shooters   Supplement (sup-ple-ment) noun....
2. Parting Shot   Brad Paisley   While Brad Paisley’s career is...