03/09/2026
This was posted by a FB friend and their privacy has been set accordingly but I do have permission to screenshot and felt this was way too interesting not to share it
“Normally with my pony posts , it is all sh*ts and giggles, ( apart from sad days). Anyway , those who know me , know i am a "why" girl , i need to know why in everything .
Last year i bought Kyle, who had been diagnosed with sweet itch , but i was unconvinced, so i set about researching and experimenting ( because i cannot help myself) and found out plenty of information from vets worldwide and along with my own observations and theories ( with thanks to all the lovely Mongolian herders i have met and their superbly hardy horses ).
My thoughts have never changed about our overfeeding horses, in fact what i have learned has convinced me i was on the right track .
This is what i have learned .....
The sugars in grass result in insulin spikes , which we all know already causes laminitis, EMS and PPID. These spikes also cause inflammation and can trigger a variety of other immune based conditions .
Horses are not designed to eat grass and grain . They thrive on very rough forage, the rougher and drier , the better.
They do not need to be eating 24 hours a day either.
Our breeding practices have disrupted and ruined their dna .
So to take Kyles case , yes he gets very itchy , but no evidence of the midge chewing at his skin, then i get to hear that his sire( Balmoral Squire) has had to be gelded as he is producing itchy offspring ( kyle is not a one off , and it is genetic) . Some of you know my thoughts on how obese the Highlands at Balmoral were and it was stupid to have them on the lush fields in front of the castle instead of being out on the hills eating heather and coarse grasses as they would if left to be wild .
Vet papers have revealed that insulin resistance can be passed down ( hereditary) to offspring if they had obesity issues as parents causing the foals to be compromised
Thus yesterday i conducted a wee experiment as i always keep my ponies lean i needed a trigger , so i let Kyle have approx two square feet of grass from behind the electric fence and i was shocked to see that , that was all it took to trigger an immune response to a small insulin spike. He ate his grass and two hours later was rolling to rub his neck ( there is nowhere else for him to rub in the paddock). When i brought him in the lower mane was gone and the neck caked in soil ! 🙄
I put on a protective hood so he could not rub on stable walls ( he kept it on , so new one is working fab ) and he is back out on hay balls and low sugar diet . !
The results have shocked me in that it took so little in the way of amounts of grass ingested to trigger the immune response! So you can imagine how little it takes to trigger laminitis or how much of these responses are hidden from our eyes, if we are not aware!
I will continue to adjust my horses metabolism to a more natural and ancient state before man interfered.”
