An interesting tidbit about laminitis in feral horses and wild equids
Track Systems - Are they worth it?
I found this EXTREMELY interesting - previously I thought (and it's really a dogma in the barefoot only crowd) that laminitis was strictly a problem in the domestic horse. It seems that this is absolutely not the case.
"Unfortunately, laminitis appears to be one of the adaptations: the cycle of getting fat, getting insulin resistant to conserve fat for harsh winters, as well as pregnancy, very much seems to prime some of the mares for spring laminitis. Only a small proportion of them are ever noticeably lame, even though their feet often show a long toe/low heel configuration: despite pretty rough and abrasive terrain, not all of them have the fabulous neat pony feet you might expect from wild living on varied terrain and scrub. But, of course, slightly sore feet is irrelevant. There are no predators, the symptoms subside, the hoof breaks away and normalises, self trimming on the rocky terrain, and the ponies are small and light anyway so cope better than a horse would even with a degree of rotation, so the ponies carry on as normal. What this means, of course, is that laminitis is NOT a problem solely of domestication, or even modernity. Brian Hampson's PhD thesis makes for interesting reading, seeing between 40% and 93% incidence in chronic laminitis in three feral horse populations, Lane Wallett looked at 1119 pedal bones from prehistoric America and discovered evidence of laminitic changes in three quarters of them, and pedal bone remodelling in a third. And obviously any internet expert in laminitis will have read Chris Pollitt's Advances in Laminitis, which begins with an excellent review of laminitis in medical literature from Classical times to the C20th (references at the end for anyone interested). What this basically means is that laminitis appears to be a problem of wild living as well as domestic living, and indeed, in savannah as well as upland environments, and in antiquity as well as the modern age." (emphasis mine)
Citations are in the link, I recommend checking out Wallet's work, there's really neat photos of old fossilized hooves
Submitted June 19, 2020 at 05:27PM by workingtrot
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/Horses/comments/hcbal0/an_interesting_tidbit_about_laminitis_in_feral/?utm_source=ifttt
No comments :
Post a Comment