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Young Riders

Young Riders

Feeding after

colic surgery

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Ahigh standard of post-operative care is crucial for a successful recovery after colic surgery. Joanna Palmer, nutritionist for Allen & Page Horse Feeds, offers feeding advice to ensure your horse receives the nutrition he needs to help return to a healthy and active lifestyle.

While hospitalised, your horse will be carefully monitored, and the reintroduction of feed will be under the close supervision of a team of experts. Only after a gradual transition to a relatively normal feeding regime has been successful will your horse be deemed fit for discharge into your care at home. The responsibility for feeding and managing a post-operative animal can be an anxious time for many owners. Still, your vet will likely give you strict recommendations as to which feeds and forages are suitable for your horse and the quantity and frequency at which they should be fed.

Following colic surgery, keeping a horse on box rest for at least eight weeks is strongly advised. This period of confinement is vital to allow healing by keeping the strain on the incision site to a minimum and help prevent complications such as a hernia developing. When confined to a stable a horse’s energy requirements will be significantly less than if they were in work. Providing a diet too high in energy could make a horse on box rest agitated and difficult to handle, which in turn will hamper healing. Nutrition at this stage should focus on supplying a balanced diet to facilitate a healthy recovery while providing a low level of energy. Keeping meal sizes small (around 500g dry weight) will minimise physical stress on the incision site. A high fibre feed that is low in starch and sugar will be gentle on the digestive system, help to encourage normal gut movement and aid the re-establishment of healthy microbial

populations that will have been compromised during the colic episode.

Feeding dry feeds can be dangerous as a horse’s digestive system is designed for a high moisture diet. Soaked feeds are therefore an invaluable part of the diet of horses recovering from colic surgery; not only are they easy to eat, but when formulated with a blend of herbs, they are highly palatable. This is particularly beneficial for fussy feeders who may have reduced appetites after their colic ordeal. A soaked feed will provide an additional source of water that can help to keep a horse hydrated when they may not physically be drinking as much as they need to. Water is essential for all bodily functions and it also aids digestive transit, helping to prevent impactions of partially digested food through the gut, hence why maximising water intake is of the utmost importance for horses recovering from any kind of colic episode. Fast Fibre is a quick soak, high fibre feed that is low in starch and sugar and balanced with vitamins and minerals – making it an ideal choice for post colic cases to provide a balanced diet in a form that is easy to eat and digest. It can also be used as a partial forage replacer to help maximise fibre intake for convalescing horses. Other suitable soaked feeds could include: unmolassed sugarbeet, alfalfa pellets or grass nuts, but these are not balanced with vitamins and minerals so would need to be fed alongside a balanced feed to ensure your horse receives adequate nutrition for maintenance and recovery.

"Many cases of colic surgery involve the removal of part of the digestive tract"

Any horse that requires a higher calorie diet to improve the condition or prevent further weight loss while recovering from colic surgery should be fed a bucket feed that supplies additional calories from fibre and oil sources, not from starch and sugar. Cereal based feeds that are high in starch are not recommended for horses recovering from colic surgery, as they are more difficult to digest and can lead to digestive disturbances and further colic episodes. Feeds such as Veteran Vitality and Calm & Condition are ideal alternatives to traditional cereal based conditioning feeds, offering all the benefits of a soaked feed with a low starch and sugar level.

Top tips to aid recovery and help prevent further colic episodes:

• Offer a variety of different forage/fibre feeds to ensure adequate intakes; • Make dietary changes very slowly (e.g. over 2-3 weeks) to allow bacterial populations in the gut time to adapt; • Utilise soaked feeds; • Provide constant access to clean, fresh water • Pay close attention to dental condition to ensure fibre is chewed adequately and reaches the hindgut in a condition that enables easy digestion; • Ensure faecal worm egg counts / effective internal parasite control procedures are in place to help maintain a healthy digestive system.

Many cases of colic surgery involve the removal of part of the digestive tract, and after that suitable feeding should focus on the part of the gut that is unaffected. The small intestine is responsible for the digestion and absorption of simple carbohydrates, protein and fats, but if part of it is removed its capacity to digest these nutrients will be compromised. Feeding should focus on hindgut (large intestine) fermentation of fibre. Conversely, as the large intestine is so big, a small removal from here may have little impact on digestive function, but if the removal is large the ability to ferment and digest fibre will be affected, so only highly digestive fibre sources should be fed. There is also a greater need for a low starch, high oil based concentrate feed to provide essential nutrients which can be digested in the fully functioning small intestine.

Most horses on box rest after colic surgery can be allowed some time grazing in hand. This ability to graze naturally is not only crucial for the horse’s psychological well-being, but the ingestion of highly digestible, fresh forage has a vital role to play in restoring digestive health and function. Aside from in-hand grazing, forage should be supplied appropriate to the stage of recovery. Immediately after surgery intakes may be limited to very small frequent amounts of highly digestible forages, but providing no complications arise a steady progression to a normal constant supply of fibre is essential for healthy gut function and to avoid boredom related issues in horses on box rest.

NUTRITIONAL ENQUIRIES Our office is still open, and our Nutrition Team are on hand to help with any of your nutritional queries.

Call: 01362 822902 (Monday to Friday, 10am - 4pm)

Email: helpline@allenandpage.co.uk

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