Health Concerns

Leading Your Horse to Water

And Making Him Want to Drink

 

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

 

There is a lot of truth in the old adage, but there are many things you can do to manage your horse’s water intake. And you need to—traveling, shooting, and even home environmental conditions all play a role in your horse’s hydration.

 

First, let’s review the basics for people new to the horse world, and try to dispel any myths your grandpa might have told you. An average light horse that weighs about 1000 pounds has a stomach capacity of approximately 2 ½ gallons of liquid when comfortably expanded. This volume can be extrapolated to fit any horse. This means that the most your horse should be able to drink at any one time is 2-3 gallons.

 

Like all animals, the horse’s body is primarily composed of water and electrolytes. The total body water (TBW) accounts for 55-65% of a horse’s body weight. Two thirds of this amount is intracellular—in the cells—and is predominately unavailable for quick usage. The other third is in true liquid form in various forms used for body operations including blood, lymphatics, lubricants, and transcellular fluids. This last category also includes the gastro-intestinal tract, which in the horse represents a large reservoir of fluid mainly held in the colon. 

 

An important point is that horses and humans are the only two species that cool primarily through the evaporation of sweat. Sweating can produce tremendous fluid and electrolyte losses that, if uncompensated for, can lead to heart and overheating problems.

 

Remember, too, that excluding sex, age, and breed variations, an average horse has about nine gallons of blood. This matters because blood reserves, in organs like the spleen and to some extent the bone marrow, can hold serum containing water and electrolytes to varying degrees. This makes the spleen the equine “spare tank” when dehydration or electrolyte deficiencies occur. All cell functions, and especially the organs of exercise, are inherently dependent on electrolytes to operate. The main positively charged electrolytes, or cations, include sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. The main negatively charged electrolytes, or anions, include chloride and bicarbonate. These are key ingredients in equine exercise related nutrition.

 

The horse racing industry in Kentucky (and several other states) is a billion dollar industry, so a large number of scientific studies have been conducted by equine exercise physiologists to understand the interrelationships of water, electrolytes, hormones, nutrition, and training techniques. As a practicing veterinarian and mounted shooting competitor, I’m aware of much of the information that these studies have revealed—and what it means in our sport.

 

First, without exception, allow your horse ample fresh drinking water whenever possible. A horse cannot realistically over drink.  And forget what you read or saw in “Black Beauty,” where the horse coliced after drinking cold water.  That’s virtually unheard of in the modern veterinary world. Cold water almost never triggers laminitis, colic, or any other know maladies.

 

So you can give your horse cold water, but that doesn’t mean he’ll drink it. Horses almost always drink lukewarm water better than they drink cold water, no matter what the ambient conditions are. This is especially true if they are exercising.  Endurance racers have proven this time and again. Thus, offering your horse ice cold water is the most likely way to get a drink refusal than any other method. Warming the water in the winter increases your horse’s water intake significantly.

 

Second, horses that eat nothing but hay rarely have adequate electrolytes in their bodies and cannot function at peak efficiency. You need to provide a reasonable amount of balanced electrolytes in daily feed supplements to compensate. In times of extreme duress, oral electrolyte pastes or solutions can help your horse withstand difficult conditions, and still obtain maximum athletic ability. There are many electrolyte and amino acid pastes available on today’s market.

 

Third, electrolytes, and even water, are less crucial in horses that are properly trained and have a good blood volume. These animals have better reserves and storage than unfit horses.  What this means is that after months of appropriate training, your horse can have a greater blood volume and stamina, despite more difficult demands. In the long run this means he can better tolerate intense sweating and partial dehydration.

 

Fourth, when trailering long distances, horses should be offered 1 – 2 gallons of water for approximately every 4 to 6 hours traveled. They should never go 10 to12 hours without a drink. Horses actually expend significant energy shifting their weight back and forth in the trailer as they go around corners. Some horses even colic after arriving from long hauls due to impacted feed and inadequate water intake en route. As hard as it is to believe, I regularly see flagrant violations of these basic guidelines. Then some of those shooters expect their equine athletes to bail out of the trailer and, within a few hours, smoke their runs, one after another. The first thing you should do on arriving at your destination is to secure your horse a drink and a place to rest quietly.

 

Fifth, most matches provide one or more community drinking troughs. These watering holes are breeding grounds for sickness, so the pros avoid them and take their horses back to their stall or trailer for a quiet, clean, uninterrupted drink.  You should do the same.

 

And finally, here’s a trick to help balking horses drink up: mix up a syringe of salty water and squirt it in their mouths. This trips the osmoreceptors, which then tell their brains that they need water.  Most will drink shortly thereafter. Adding salt or powdered electrolytes to the feed also helps.

 

Bottom line—to provide your horse a high quality nutritional plan, train him until he or she is highly fit, provide adequate amounts of fresh water, and whatever you do, don’t let him drink from the communal trough at the end of the arena. You’ll know the one; it has the colorful, foamy “floaties” on top.  That’s the one place where you don’t want to lead your horse—and you really don’t want him to drink.

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