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Nighttime Glare

The days are getting shorter, increasing the likelihood that you’ll be hauling your horse at night. When you drive in the dark, the lights of other vehicles can reduce your visibility, especially in wet weather. Water refracts light, worsening its effects. Here are several things you can do to manage nighttime glare.

Schedule an eye exam. Night blindness (nyctalopia) affects how well you see at night. This condition is actually a symptom of another problem, such as nearsightedness, glaucoma, or cataracts. Schedule regular eye exams by an ophthalmologist or optometrist.

Clean your windshield. As with sun glare, clean your windshield to reduce glare refraction. Flip your mirror. Flip the rearview mirror from day mode to night mode.

When you drive in the dark, the lights of other vehicles can reduce your visibility.

Seasonaltip

Fall Feeding

Look away. Avoid looking directly at oncoming vehicles at night. Instead, look down and to the right. Use your peripheral vision to watch the other vehicle until it passes you.

You likely know you shouldn’t start, increase, or change grains rapidly. This is one of the most dangerous things you can do in terms of risking intestinal upset. However, you may not realize that changes in hay can be bad, too. Even if you always feed the same type of hay, such as timothy, Bermuda grass, or alfalfa, different cuttings under varying growth conditions, and even different strains of the same type of forage can vary in the level of rapidly fermentable nutrients they contain.

Even changes in pasture plants can cause problems for your horse if the composition changes too much. This is especially true in the fall and spring, when grasses are growing (or regrowing) at a rapid rate. Follow these guidelines to help prevent feed-related gut upsets:

• Introduce grain feeding gradually, no more than 1 pound per feeding.

• Allow three days between each increase in grain to enable organisms to adapt.

• Don’t feed more than 4 pounds of grain at one time.

• Make changes in hay gradually, replacing from 10% to 25% of the old hay with the new variety; increase every three days.

Changes in forage and pasture plants can cause gut problems for your horse if the composition changes too much. This is especially true in the fall and spring, when grasses are growing (or regrowing) at a rapid rate.

• Accustom your horse to lush pastures gradually, especially if grass is growing rapidly (spring and some fall conditions).

• Keep hay available for horses on young growths of pasture grass to provide complex and slowly fermented fiber, which the grasses may be lacking.

— Eleanor M. Kellon, VMD