It’s the time of the year when all horse and pony owners need to be specially careful about the grazing their equine charges have access to. And when a really good bedding becomes even more essential to the health of your horses’ and ponies’ hooves.
Why?
The Spring risk…
As the Spring days grow longer and warmer, the grass is growing, and sugar levels are rising. As you all know, this poses a big risk to many horses and ponies vulnerable to laminitis, the excruciatingly painful and potentially crippling condition that will literally stop a horse or pony in its tracks.
Horses and ponies can suffer from laminitis at any time of the year, but one major known cause of an attack is the higher level of sugars in lush grass during Spring and Autumn.
How do you prevent laminitis?
PREVENTION is infinitely better than cure in all cases of equine ill-health, but particularly when it comes to laminitis. The only sensible way to safeguard against an attack of laminitis is to restrict your horse or pony’s intake of carbohydrate-rich hard feed and sugar-rich new grass. This is very tough indeed on a horse or pony whose overwhelming instinct is to get out there into a paddock of new grass and stuff itself as fast and as full as it can.
But you have to be cruel to be kind, and that means keeping vulnerable horses and ponies off the grass. Which in turn means they are likely to spend more of their time in the stable.
We have always stressed that hoofcare should be an important factor in your choice of bedding. Horses standing for long periods in a stable need a bedding that supports their hooves properly, keeps the surface of the bed dry and ammonia away from the hoof wall, and doesn’t dry the hoof out too much – which causes cracking that allows infection into the foot.
Bedmax may look pretty simple, but we’ve developed our shavings to try and combat all these potential risks, and to provide your horses and ponies with the most comfortable, supportive, hygienic (naturally), protective bedding that will help as much as possible to keep your horse’s or pony’s hooves in good condition. After all, ‘No Hoof, No Horse’ is as true today as it was when first written by Xenophon in ancient Greece, over 2,300 years ago.
So now is a particularly important time to choose the right bedding for your horses’ hooves.
If you are protecting your horse against the threat of laminitis, you need a bedding that makes those long hours in the stable as comfortable and healthy as possible.
And if you have a horse or pony confined to box rest suffering from an attack of this agonising condition, you will want a bedding that works best to help relieve the effects and promote the fastest possible recovery.
