Category: Important

Iron overload likely caused my horses’ laminitis

Posted on: July 12, 2015

Toxicology test on horses' iron level

Toxicology test on horses’ iron level.

Hematology test on horses' iron level

Hematology test on horses’ iron level.

Post reviewed April 5, 2026.

In “Clue” like fashion, I’m declaring the cause of my six horses’ laminitis over the last 18 years as an excess intake of iron from weeds, trace mineral blocks and well water, leading to insulin resistance and the insulin form of laminitis.

The insulin resistance and laminitis were exacerbated by me following veterinary guidance to restrict the horses’ hay, keep the horses on dry lots and prevent the horses from eating so-called “lush grass.” I now believe these moves were the exact opposite of what was needed to get the horses’ metabolism functioning properly.

In the game of “Clue,” I’d get immediate confirmation of whether my assertion is correct. Unfortunately, with the laminitis, I will receive no such feedback.

But a cascade of events led me to this conclusion.

In October 2014, I needed to have my leaking well fixed (the water pressure was down considerably, and a pond had formed to the west).

But I also wanted to have my horses’ iron levels tested at Kansas State University’s lab. I suspected iron as the cause of the horses’ laminitis for a decade but had no proof.

A previous iron test done through the local zoo did not provide useful results.

Several experts recommended KSU for these tests (I’m not making such a recommendation at the moment). I was hoping to do a three-test panel of serum iron, TIBC and ferritin (a hematology test) and a serum trace mineral panel (a toxicology test). I admit I didn’t know what I was doing. I wanted some data.

There wasn’t enough money to do the tests and fix the well.

The iron tests for my two living horses totaled $400, including my vet’s fees. I chose to do the tests and hope for the best with the well.

My vet didn’t provide this iron test as a regular service but agreed to draw the blood if I did the mailing.

I sent the package in a vet-provided cooled envelope by overnight shipping on a Thursday. KSU said shipping on Thursday was fine as long as the package arrived Friday morning. I don’t know what happened to the package after it got under way. I don’t know when it arrived or was tested, and all may have gone as planned.

I received results from KSU that suggested my horses had toxic levels of iron (see images at top).

A university vet who provided comments on the tests said the toxic level “could be indicative of artifactual hemolysis” within the submitted sample. In other words, the blood got too warm or tainted in transit.

I talked to a lab person by phone, and the blood was indeed considered compromised.

I personally believed the results were correct as far as the horses having too much iron but couldn’t be sure, and I couldn’t do the tests again due to the cost.

I had my own iron level tested through a company I found online, Lab Corp, for considerably less money, and my iron level was normal, making me think the iron theory had come up short.

My sister told me my iron results did not seem normal, given that all the women in my family were anemic. She said I likely was anemic, too, and was being affected by the iron in the water.

Meanwhile, also in 2014, veterinarian Frank Reilly, a leading advocate for laminitic horses, posted on his website the iron levels of common pasture weeds. The iron levels are really high. Excess iron can fuel insulin resistance.

I knew my horses had been eating more weeds than anything else in recent years because I had intentionally ignored the grass, thinking that less grass was better. The grass went away, and the horses ate the weeds.

I was suspicious of the well water having too much iron, since the water turns everything rust colored and has eaten through the bottom of all my aluminum tanks. But I still didn’t have proof there. A water test in 2005 showed nothing suspicious.

I did find out that the horses’ trace mineral blocks were 25 percent iron, and I threw those away in 2012.

In November 2014, I emailed Dr. Reilly, asking how one might reduce the iron level in horses through supplements. He spent his Thanksgiving holiday investigating this idea. He emailed back that curcumin and ginkgo could reduce the iron level, and he provided suggested amounts and where to buy it. Purebulk.com sells the curcumin (250 grams, $70 at the time — it’s gone up). Reilly suggested feeding 1/2 tablespoon a day. Starwest Botanicals sells ginkgo leaf cut and sifted (1 pound bag). Reilly suggested feeding 1 tablespoon in the morning and 1 tablespoon in the evening.

After giving the horses the two supplements for a few weeks, I stopped because my gelding Kurt was breaking out in drenching sweats as we entered yet another frigid winter. We eventually figured out the sweats were caused by thyroid powder (no longer given).

Also, a friend had sent me a camping filter for the well head to filter out iron, but I don’t use the well head during the winter due to the hose always being frozen. I carry buckets of hot water outside. So I didn’t put on the filter.

All these things nagged at me, but polar vortex winters tend to keep one busy.

Everything came together in May 2015, when I finally had the well fixed, and a well company employee blurted out, “You must have an iron problem” when telling me how deep the well was. The casing is 350 feet deep (very deep) and collects iron all along the shaft, which gets transferred to the water as the water sloshes through, according to the well guy, an industry veteran.

The irony is not lost on me that fixing the well gave me more information than the iron tests.

Feed more hay to laminitic horse, equine nutritionist says

Posted on: June 14, 2015

Restricting Kurt's food intake has not reduced his girth.

Restricting Kurt’s food intake has not reduced his girth. Quite the opposite. During the first half of 2015, Kurt was given a flake of hay during the morning and evening and another overnight. He did have access to pastures, but there was no grass from January to March and the flies drove him into the shed from April to June (despite him being fly sprayed).

Post reviewed April 5, 2026.

Guilt drives a lot of my laminitis research. I’m always looking to clear my conscience. Did I cause my horses’ laminitis? Or did something else do so?

Since 1998, when my first laminitis case occurred, I’ve routinely paid vets to heap on more guilt. Each farm call has led to the same conclusion: My horses are obese; thus, I must be overfeeding them and causing the insulin resistance and laminitis.

Now, a new article suggests my horses are obese because I’m underfeeding them.

I’m still guilty, just of a different crime.

The article is written by equine nutritionist Juliet Getty, Ph.D., who makes her money consulting so she’s not going to go too far out on a limb unless she’s convinced she’s correct.

The article is titled, “Can the Damaged Insulin Resistant Horse Be Fixed?”

It’s long, and I’m just picking out a few things, but the whole article is worth reading at least twice.

Getty says we’ve created the insulin resistant horse by doing all the wrong things in the name of helping.

She urges owners to give horses free choice, low-carb hay, so horses eat constantly and slowly, as they were intended to eat. As in, horses should never be without hay.

To those, including me, who blurt out, “That’s going to cost a lot of money,” she says it will save money in the end because the horse will eat less. My horses poop on their leftover hay so I have issues there, but she would probably say I need to work on how I feed my horses.

She also suggests turning horses out on pasture (preferably after testing the sugar level in the grass, which I personally think is a waste of time since the sugar level in pasture rises and falls all day long).

Getty says, “Horses who graze on pasture 24/7 will eat far less grass than those who are only allowed to graze on pasture for a few hours each day, with hay provided the rest of the time.”

She includes caveats such as it might be good to ease a horse into having hay full time by using a couple of slow feeders that are always kept full.

She suggests not stalling a horse, which may be out of the question for a lot of horse owners, but Getty feels that’s a big factor for horse health.

Getty doesn’t address calories. I would argue that today’s hay seems to have an excessive amount of calories (about 2,000 calories per flake), but I’m guessing she feels a horse will stop eating when it has enough calories.

She concludes that the only way to fix an insulin resistant horse is to help it return to its natural state. She emphasizes that continuing down the same path of restricting food will get the same results: more insulin resistance.

I would add that it is possible to get a horse to lose weight by limiting its food and exercising it like crazy. But the result is temporary. The horse is not healthy, and adding a little more hay will make that horse balloon up.

Other factors that Getty mentions are addressing inflammation and lowering iron intake.

I worry that a horse with insulin resistance from excess iron may not improve if it is given free-choice hay and it continues to shovel in the hay. The horse may get worse.

My takeaway from the article is it needs to be embraced in its entirety. Helping an insulin resistant laminitic horse requires addressing all the possible issues that are causing the insulin resistance, not just forage intake.

Getty’s suggestions are revolutionary. She’s going against the advice of perhaps all leading laminitis researchers and vets.

Some of the top speakers at laminitis conferences have visited my farm (as friends of my former vet) and advised:

— Kill the grass on the pastures completely;
— Dry lot the horses on the existing paddocks and rent out the pastures to thoroughbreds (my horses would have loved that);
— Break up the 2-acre pastures into tiny pastures to limit access and improve the grass;
— Move.

Over the years, I found that restricting the horses’ food and dry lotting them made them fatter. And miserable. And the laminitis continued.

I refused to listen to laminitis researchers who were anti-grazing.

Horses closely related to my own were on bigger and much lusher pastures within a few miles of my farm, and those horses were thin and healthy. It convinced me that the grass itself was not the problem.

I wanted my horses walking constantly, covering a lot of ground, taking in a steady stream of forage and keeping busy.

In 2007, I fenced my two ungrazed lower fields (an additional 4 acres to the overgrazed 4 acres already fenced) and turned my remaining horses loose. I felt even more guilty, if possible, but at least my horses didn’t hate me. In the end, there was no uptick in laminitic cases. If anything, the bouts dropped.

I haven’t seen a groundswell of criticism of Getty’s article. But it is a study in contrasts with advice from other experts.

Kathryn Watts, retired plant scientist, creator of the safergrass.org website and a onetime hugely popular speaker, used to have a PDF on her consulting page that started out:

“If you insist on keeping an obese, non-exercised, laminitic horse on pasture at least 12 hours per day all year long … I cannot help you or your horse. My pasture management advice will include limiting grass intake, increasing exercise and completely eliminating access to pasture during periods when environmental conditions make it impossible to control grass sugar content by cultural practices. If you cannot or will not limit intake, it will be a waste of your money and my time to give you a complete pasture management program.”

Thehorse.com posted an article June 8, 2015, on feeding the laminitic horse that offers tips from Jennifer A. Wrigley, CVT, of New Bolton Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The school founded the now shuttered international laminitis conference in 2001.

Wrigley’s tips include restricting hay for the laminitic horse and perhaps dry lotting the horse.

Those of us who dieted heavily in our teens and 20s will attest to the counterproductive effect of restricting food intake. It makes one want food more. I never looked at the science behind why dieting made me crazy, but the craziness was undeniable. Getty has provided the science.

Laminitic horses already go through hell.

After reading Getty’s article, I realize we have been keeping our horses in that hell perpetually.

No guilt there.

Vet examines why some laminitic feet return to soundness

Posted on: October 18, 2014

Post reviewed April 5, 2026: As I have stated elsewhere, so-called perfect measurements for healthy hooves often are not applicable to chronically laminitic hooves, as trying to force the laminitic hoof to conform to these shapes makes the horse sore. At least that’s my experience. But this was a very interesting talk.

Some horses recovering from laminitis and coffin bone rotation become sound even though the hoof wall no longer is parallel to the bone. Dr. Debra Taylor, DVM, looks at possible explanations for this occurrence in a video posted on thehorse.com in September 2014.

Taylor is an equine podiatrist at Auburn University in Alabama.

In Taylor’s 53-minute presentation, she discusses her journey in trying to come up with basic definitions for what constitutes a healthy equine foot and an appropriate physical exam of the foot.

Much of her presentation focuses on the back half of the foot and its soft tissue structures, more suited for absorbing concussion than the front half of the foot.

Taylor said she used to focus on the front of the hoof with laminitic horses, trying to regenerate normal parallelism between the hoof wall and coffin bone. When some of the horses became sound without parallelism, she asked herself: “What in the world are these horses walking on?”

One thing she saw was that increased heel volume seemed to play a role in a horse returning to soundness despite incomplete resolution of rotation. She hypothesized that increased heel volume might compensate for coffin bone remodeling or damage to the laminae.

She said hoof loading creates shock waves that are strong enough to crack a bone, but generally they don’t. They are absorbed through soft tissue. The front part of the foot has less soft tissue and is more rigid, making it more susceptible to shock waves. Taylor said a large frog and prominent heels are likely to play a significant role in cushioning hoof impact.

She credits farrier Pete Ramey with inspiring her to investigate the roles of the front and back of the foot. Ramey once commented that the coffin bone supports the front half of the foot and the digital cushion and lateral cartilages support the back half. She set about quantifying that ratio.

Taylor shows data on three feet comparing the size of the coffin bone in each to the size of the soft tissue structures. In the foot considered the healthiest, the lateral cartilages and digital cushion make up 159 percent of the area of the coffin bone. In the weakest foot, the soft tissue makes up less than 100 percent of the area of the coffin bone. Taylor said there’s a huge variation in nature and perhaps this type of comparison in a hoof can be useful in predicting whether the hoof is capable of taking care of that horse.

Taylor starts her presentation by talking about how horses’ feet are smart, changing in response to external factors. She wonders if the use of physical stimulation and physical therapy can create, or forge, the tissue needed for a healthy equine foot.

Working on grants, she realized there was no consensus on what a healthy foot looks like. Using several papers, she came up with the following description of a healthy foot. She provides 3-D models in her lecture to help illustrate.

Healthy hoof ratio

The foot should have more weight-bearing surface in the back half than the front using the widest part of the foot as a reference line.

Taylor does not review how to find the widest part of the foot. Some hoof experts suggest doubling the length of the central sulcus, or frog dimple, to reach the true apex of the frog, then measuring an inch back toward the heel to indicate the widest part of the foot. Farrier Gene Ovnicek provides an often-used hoof mapping protocol on his website.

Taylor said the front of the foot should be 40 to 50 percent of the weight-bearing surface of the foot and the back part of the hoof should be 50 to 60 percent of the weight-bearing surface of the foot.

Farriers who use this ratio often comment that most horses are trimmed with 60 to 70 percent of the weight-bearing surface out front of the widest part of the hoof, leading to too much pressure on the toe, prying apart of the laminae and painful abscessing.

Healthy frog dimensions

Taylor said the width of a frog should be 50 to 60 percent of its length. The depth should reach the ground, and there should not be a huge air cavity under the frog. The central sulcus, or dimple in the frog, should be wide and shallow without thrush. She shows an example of a heel that became healthier after she treated the frog for bacteria and fungus over a couple of months in muddy weather.

Healthy digital cushion

The digital cushion (a flexible layer of tissue that sits between the lateral cartilages and above the frog and cushions the back half of the foot), should be about 2 inches thick at the back of the foot and three to four fingers wide. She said veterinarians need instrumentation to evaluate the density of the digital cushion, perhaps a tool that would be similar to an A-shore scale measurement tool used to evaluate the density of rubber. She said the density of a digital cushion in decent feet is similar to that of a tennis ball or well-done steak. As for deformability, the digital cushion should have minimum deformability with maximum thumb pressure. She demonstrates how to palpate this tissue at the back of the foot. But she also said that the shape of the digital cushion as it tapers off toward front of the hoof may actually determine how effective it is in supporting the foot.

Healthy collateral cartilages

The collateral cartilages on either side of the digital cushion should be thick but slightly bendable with moderate thumb pressure and about 3 to 4 inches apart.

Healthy bars

The bars should end mid-frog and stand fairly erect. Taylor says to remove folded-over bars that may bruise the sole.

Coronary band circumference

Taylor says her team is finding that coronary band circumference is a good predictor of the volume of the internal structures. She did not provide more detail on that.

Healthy collateral grooves

She said her team was working on a paper on using the collateral grooves (the grooves alongside the frog) to predict coffin bone position. She said her team believed they would be able to use the slope of the collateral grooves to predict sole depth, coffin bone suspension off the ground, palmar angle, and maybe even heel development.

Ramey, the farrier, has done a lot of work in this area and describes the role of the collateral grooves as visual guides. On his website, he says the sole grows down from the bottom of the coffin bone. The sole corium, a bloody layer between the coffin bone and sole, is consistently a half inch away from the collateral grooves at their deepest part, no matter whether the rest of the sole is too thick or too thin. Thus, if a horse has a lot of sole, the collateral grooves will be deep. If a horse has little sole thickness, the collateral grooves will be shallow.

In Taylor’s lecture, she said the grooves gradually get deeper toward the back of the foot. The front hooves get deeper more quickly than the back feet. The collateral groove slope predicts palmar angle (the slope of the bottom of the coffin bone in the front feet). The palmar angle in the front feet averages about 6 degrees, while the angle (called the plantar angle) in the back feet is about 2 degrees.

She said an undulating, or wavy, collateral groove would be akin to a dropped arch in a human foot and cause discomfort, as would collateral grooves deeper at the frog apex, which would indicate a negative slope of the bottom of the coffin bone and warrant radiographs.

Taylor said horse feet can have pathology, even though a horse is sound, much like people can function normally even though they are on the verge of a heart attack. She thinks a lot of horses are in this state, on the verge of a hoof attack, and no one recognizes that there’s pathology in the foot.

She said she saw so many feet with pathology in her early experience that she believed such feet were normal until she learned more about the function of the foot.

In a nod to the barefoot movement, she said barefoot farriers are running ahead of science in their hypothesis that the back half of the foot is essential for overall hoof health and the back half is very smart, or adaptive.

She also quotes an ancient Greek horse expert in his day who said smooth surfaces lead to the detriment of the equine foot and horses should be stabled on cobblestone.

Taylor shows an equine foot that developed a healthy concave sole after walking on pea gravel. She said horses get addicted to shoes and hoof boots, and lack of necessary stimulation may hinder healthy development and healing of those feet.

What is the link between laminitis and horse smegma?

Posted on: April 14, 2013

This article was reviewed Sept. 13, 2026. I would reiterate that regular cleaning is the key to battling excess smegma and any related itching. Itching always gets worse when it’s warmer outside, so more attention needs to be paid to the problem in the summer.

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Horse smegma is not a topic that gets a lot of press.

I went on a mission in 2013 to find the definitive study on smegma and laminitis and came up empty. None seemed to exist.

Horse smegma is the stuff that builds up inside the male horse’s sheath.

I found a few desperate forum postings by horse owners requesting help in dealing with horses with an itchy sheath, as well as references on less established sites to excessive smegma production in horses with insulin resistance. But I didn’t find one university or medical site that had waded into the conversation, as of 2013.

Kurt has what I would describe as excess smegma. And he used to itch a lot. He was backing into me, sometimes at a trot. Sometimes, he would see me come out of the house and run to me from across the driveway, then spin around and back into me.

My vet made a renewed effort to tackle this issue in February 2013 when I pointed out the problem had existed for five years, and I felt like a terrible owner.

Luckily, I now have female vets. My previous male vets just sort of sighed when I brought up the topic. I think their take on it was that Kurt should take a little itch like a man. It wasn’t a “little” itch, and Kurt preferred to fix it.

In the past, the female vet tried cleaning Kurt herself, as well as approving the idea of me trying various feminine hygiene products on Kurt. None worked.

Kurt tumor 2 17 2013

Kurt’s biggest tumor in his sheath on Feb. 17, 2013, was about half an inch in size. As of January 2026, the tumor is now the size of a golf ball. I really wish we had taken it off in 2013, but I was told laminitic horses are not great candidates for surgery because they heal so slowly. No one expected Kurt to live to age 30. Is this tumor uncomfortable or causing itching? Probably a little of both. All of Kurt’s sheath tumors are slow-growing melanomas.

This time, she suggested we put Kurt on Tagamet, or cimetidine, commonly used as an antacid in horses and people because it blocks the action of histamine on certain cells in the stomach. Maybe it would block a similar allergic reaction in the sheath. The drug also has been shown in some studies to benefit cancer patients. Kurt has several tumors in his sheath. The idea was to reduce the itching and shrink the tumors.

Note that my own search of these tumor studies found more research that says the drug doesn’t help than does. However, there are a lot of forums with horse owners reporting that Tagamet prevented regrowth of a tumor that was removed. I would consider inhibiting growth of tumors worth using it. Mostly, I cared about the itching.

Kurt started taking the Tagamet on March 5, 2013, and he was on it for a month.   The experiment looked good in the early going. He didn’t back into me very much. We went days without him bothering me. I think he was distracted by the snow. Once the weather warmed to 70 degrees, Kurt became itchy again. I’m not recommending Tagamet as a treatment for the itch. We stopped using it.

After hearing some local radio broadcasters rave about a mixture of water, mouthwash and vinegar as a foot wash, I decided to try that on Kurt’s sheath. It turned out to be a great concoction for cleaning a sheath, and I added baking soda to the mix because I thought it helped reduce the itch even more. Kurt became much less frantic. And the cleanings reduced the smell considerably.

I later removed the vinegar from the mixture because I didn’t think it was needed.

I clean Kurt every two weeks in a process that I describe here.

Silvia Kornherr, an equine nutritionist from Canada, read my original post on this topic and commented that insulin resistance and Cushing’s disease deal with metabolic dysfunction, which leads to many hormonal imbalances, not just inbalances in insulin and ACTH. Logically, there are going to be secondary changes in many areas affected by the hormonal imbalances.

She said many owners of horses with Cushing’s report increased smegma production and a change in the consistency of the smegma. The smegma becomes very thick, glue-like and abrasive against the sensitive sheath skin, causing inflammation, itching and infection, as well as blockage.

Based on her experience in treating horses with this problem, she suggested I try Animal Legends’ Tea Tree Oil enriched with vitamins A, D and E in the spray formulation. So we did in July 2013. We don’t use it currently because the washing alone seems to solve the problem.

So what is the contents of smegma?

There’s an amusing article on ScienceBlogs that discusses the content. The article says smegma is a waxy, oily secretion from skin cells. It consists of about 71 percent fatty acids and 18 percent cholesterol and cholesterol esters.

The article looks at a study published in 1947 by top research institutions that applied horse smegma to mice (poor mice) to see if the smegma produced cancerous tumors. It did not.

I’m not trying to blame Kurt’s tumors on the smegma. The mice study did say that horse smegma was used because penile cancer is frequent in the horse. But, technically, Kurt has sheath tumors. And that study was done in 1947. There are other statements in the study that are not backed up by current science.

Another interesting study is one published by a veterinary school in Turkey in 2006 that looked at the immune function of the reproductive tract of stallions, including their sheaths, and it concluded that the reproductive tract does likely “contribute to the immune surveillance” of the horse. I suspect the fact that Kurt’s sheath has been having an immune system reaction is not helping the insulin resistance.

I hit the jackpot when I did a Google search of “diabetes” and “itch,” because Google suggested several additional terms and one was “groin.” A forum associated with the American Diabetes Association is full of people, both male and female, with anguished stories about groin itch related to their diabetes. And the ADA’s page on skin disorders says: “As many as 33 percent of people with diabetes will have a skin disorder caused or affected by diabetes at some time in their lives. In fact, such problems are sometimes the first sign that a person has diabetes. … These include bacterial infections, fungal infections, and itching.”

If your laminitic horse has jock itch, and your vet rolls his eyes or sighs, this is one condition that you can help on your own with products found easily. Click this link to read a tutorial on cleaning an itchy sheath. Your horse will thank you.