 |
RE: [RC] [RC] RC RC:Thanks Leonard - heidiNik, here are a few points to ponder.
1) A 500 kg horse "contains" about 20 kg of
electrolytes. Of that, about 40% is calcium, so he contains about
12 kg of of other e-lytes.
2) While the losses in sweat seem like a lot, do the math
sometime on the amount of sodium, potassium, and chloride in
forages. It is relatively high, and horses that eat the amounts
that our endurance horses ingest far more e-lytes in one
day's worth of hay than the calculated losses on a 100-mile
ride.
3) The "soup" in the horse's hindgut consists of what he ate
2 days ago--in other words, his gut contains at least two days' worth
of feed. See point #2. The hindgut of the properly fed
horse is a huge electrolyte reserve, as well as a fluid
reserve.
4) As for fluid, an average horse in temperate weather
consumes about 5-10 gallons per day. )That's a shade less than
20-40 liters for those of you in countries more progressive than
the US of A who use the metric system.) A lactating
broodmare on a hot day will drink upwards of 100 gallons per
day. (For the aforementioned, that's a bit less than 400
liters.) Although a horse's stomach only holds about 2
gallons (8 liters, for the aforementioned), water is absorbed so
rapidly that IF the horse does not have his cellular
mechanisms for transporting water across the lining of the stomach
impaired (say, by too many electrolytes), he can often drink up to five
gallons (20 liters, for the English-unit-challenged from more
progressive countries) in one go. At any rate, replacing fluid
losses on the order that Nik mentions (7.5-10 gallons, for those of you
in the US of A who are metric-challenged) is not a difficult thing for
the horse to do in the course of the ride.
Bottom line--the key here is keeping the horse EATING. If he
eats well, he will generally drink well, which in turn will
sufficiently hydrate the food that he ingests so that he can
benefit. But really, he is drawing from that great huge vat in
his hindgut, if you have fed him adequately going into the ride--every
volume of "hindgut soup" that he dehydrates into a ball of manure gives
him both e-lytes and fluids. What he has to do is to keep eating
to keep that all moving, so it doesn't just sit there.
Now let's look at the flip side. Let's pour a bunch of
e-lytes into his stomach. Critters are tough, and his gut will
try like hell to assimilate the stuff, but he will have to draw fluid
out of the bloodstream (and in turn out of cells) and into the stomach
in order to process that big wad of caustic stuff. And if you
mess with this mechanism enough, you end up with horses that actually
reverse the direction of the flow of fluid so that it tends to go INTO
the gut from the body instead of into the body from the gut. This
condition in the upper small intestine is called anterior enteritis, and
it is on the rise in endurance horses in this country. Left
unrefluxed, this fluid can actually result in rupture of the
stomach. (Been a few cases of that in recent years.) This
is also called "third-spacing" of fluid.
The subject of ulcers has been discussed here, and there is also a
connection there to e-lytes. Oh, great--you need this horse to
eat, so you stick stuff in his stomach that makes it hurt so that he
doesn't want to eat.
I'll add that there are some specific situations where e-lyte
supplementation is necessary and advisable--but on review of the
amounts of fluids and e-lytes involved in consumption and loss
(never mind the flip side of what can happen when you give too much),
I can't think of ANY excuse for giving the big walloping doses
that are currently in vogue in this sport in the US of A.
Kudos to the French for doing their homework--Leonard is right, you
get good performance by first breeding good horses, then raising them
right, and then conditioning them right, feeding them right, and
putting good riders on them. E-lytes are not a shortcut to the
end of that formula.
Heidi
-------- Original Message --------
|