Colic and Stabled Horses

I got my first horse when I was 7 years old, Sonny was a nasty little Shetland Pony, pitching me off in wheat stubble and sand burrs every chance he got.  But I was undaunted.  As I grew older, I graduated to the cowboy's working horse, The American Quarter Horse.  My parents trailered me everywhere to horse shows and rodeos.  There wasn't anything I wouldn't try on horseback.  Later on, in my twenties, my Dad started keeping racing Quarter Horses.  We were simple country folks, and our horses didn't live in fancy barns with fancy stalls.  Only time they were regularly stalled was when they were in training for the track. As I went to veterinary college and during my rotation in the equine medicine department, I had the opportunity to see many horses that were suffering severely with colic and required surgery.  It occurred to me then how amazing it was that in all the years my family and I had horses, we never had one colic case.  I wondered if this was great management or just dumb luck.  I even asked my instructors if they felt that the stalling of horses increased incidences of colic...at that time, they couldn't say that they felt that was true.

Recently a research team in the United Kingdom used ultrasound to assess the frequency of intestinal contractions, comparing stalled horses to pastured horses.  Apparently, housing horses in pastures rather than stalls, could reduce the likelihood of a horse developing colic.  The research team found that stalled horses had a decrease in intestinal motility as compared to pasture kept horses.

What amazes me the most about this news is that there had to be a research team to confirm this.  Given that horses are obligate grazers and left to their own travel miles a day foraging for food and our knowledge that the gastrointestinal tract is stimulated by movement, why should this information be all that surprising.  I see the same thing in small animals, the more exercise they get, the better their digestive tract and bowel movements.  Even when we as humans are hospitalized for any purpose, our medical professionals encourage physical movement, and ask us constantly if we have had a BM today, because they know our gut mobility is decreased during our sedentary stay in the hospital.

The word 'colic' simply but means belly ache.  Lots of things can cause colic, too much grain, too much hay, not enough water, internal parasites, cancers, too hot, etc, but certainly the lack of good exercise is a contributing factor.  Standing in a stall for hours on end is not only boring....but is not healthy either.  Horses by nature are foragers.  In search for a good meal, a horse will travel 20 miles a day on the average.  When we stall our horses (all for our human reasons and convenience) we are denying them the opportunity to be a horse and compromising their intestinal health.

I am not trying to convince horse lovers to turn their horses out (well maybe a little), but we should be aware that the more we manage like mother nature, the healthier our animals may be.