Horse Diseases That Make Them Lose Weight

In young horses, parasitism can be a leading cause of weight loss, and other causes of weight loss include the inability to absorb protein, oral lesions and maldigestion. Find out how to get horse diseases diagnosed with information from a veterinarian in this free video on horse diseases.

Some horse diseases that can make your horses weight can vary. I'm Dr. Gary Garcia of Keystone Equine Associates and we're in Odessa, Florida outside of Tampa. You know first of all a lot of people talk about parasitism and in young horses parasitism can be a leading cause of weight loss. I urge you to consult your veterinarian. A lot of deworming programs have changed most recently. And it's very common for us to now do fecal egg counts and find out what kind of parasitic burden horses have in general. But especially the young horses. So we urge you to do that. So parasitism being probably number 1 for weight loss in young horses. There are some other issues that horses can have. Protein losing enteropathy is where they can't absorb their protein well. Oral lesions in horses mouths where their hindered to digest their food and chew their hay and that sort of thing. And that can throw their weight off. You also have malabsorbtion or maldigestion in a horse that just cannot digest certain foods. They can have allergies to certain foods which do not allow them to absorb specific entities of that food. But one more common thing that we're seeing a lot more in horses is gastric and duodenal ulcers. These can throw horses off their feed. Especially their sweet feeds or their high carbohydrate laden feeds. So what we like to do is you can get these diagnosed by gastroscopy. And that involves some sedation of your horse and running a gastroscope down to the stomach lining and looking for ulcers there. Gastric ulcers can cause them thriftiness in the coat, weight loss, inability to just train, training issues. And it's usually young horses we see under training conditions, stress. Horses that have gone through stressful colics and that sort of thing can develop ulcers and they can be quite devastating over a period of time. Ulcers are treatable with many different treatments from a daily treatment of say something like Maalox up to also a daily treatment of something called Gastroguard which is quite effective in ulcers in horses. So if you have horses that are not eating, young horses under stress, or horses that have been through a stressful situation, disease or whatever, we urge you to contact your veterinarian and follow up with some ulcer diagnostics.