Did you know Alfalfa hay linked to enteroliths? (stones)?

Question

University of Californis says diests in alfalfa hay increassed the stones? (intestial stones) They form around foreign material in the intestine. 61 horses in 2 yrs, referred to clinic due to colic or instedtial blockages caused by stones. The researchers found that only factor associated with stone formation were lack of access to pasture grazing and a diet comprised of 50 percent of more alfalfe hay. Have you ever heard this? I haven't and in winter is when I feed alfalfa and no pastue? So I'll be cutting back. Just thought you would like to know.

What do you all think?

Have a wonderful weekend, everyone.

Answer 1

My father grows alfalfa, has fed his horses over 40yrs & we have never had any problems.  That is all our horses get feed. They say all this stuff about alfalfa & we have never seen any ill effects.

Answer 2

I knew about and learned the hard way .... I rescued a horse and 6 months later he was gone .... he had a HUGE stone and I was told it was due to over feeding alfalfa ....

I have NOT got my magazine yet this month but can't wait to read the article.  My vet said Alfalfa has too much protein .... and it is fine if broken up with other feeds ..... because I rescued him I can't say what he ate all his life but I am guessing it was Alfalfa ......

PS .... Star Milling has "growth" .. "adult" and "lite" diet that contains NO Alfalfa .... Full of beet pulp ... soyhusks ... flax seed ... oils .... etc ... It is called INTEGRITY!  I love it .... been feeding it since I lost my guy .....

http://www.starmilling.com/feed-horse.ht...

Answer 3

Yes I knew this and Equus had an article about it this month.

I think it was a great article. I love Equus they have the best health info.

We do not feed an alfalfa to our horses. We feed only grass hay, pasture, and they get a pelleted feed.

Thay are fully mature horses they youngest is 8 so they do not need the extra protein and I prefer the grass hay as the base for their diet.

They all hold their weight well and the vet thinks things look fine. So we stick with what works for us.

Thank goodness we have great grass hay available here.

Answer 4

I haven't heard of this, but my own personal experiences with alfalfa hay would seem to suggest that perhaps these researchers have a valid point. Feeding alfalfa to excess is never a good practice, because the extra protein is hard on the kidneys, and it can make horses very hot and stupid when they are ridden. We feed our horses alfalfa pellets in their grain- but only once per day- and we are gradually going to eliminate some of this as we switch to feeding beet pulp this winter. Our hay is a special, drought resistant, higher protein hay called Teff, which is native to South America ( it's widely grown in Argentina and other countries down there) and we feed a mix of that and grass hay, as well as some Timothy when we can get it.  The Teff has only been recently introduced to our area by a local farmer that we know- and we are going to buy it from him.

The other issue which I have with alfalfa hay, apart from cost, is that in some horses, the protein overload can cause or contribute to founder. I once worked at a facility where there was a mare who had foundered so badly that she was walking on her KNEE joints ( I kid you not, this was really true, and I had to work with this poor animal) and all they fed on that place was alfalfa. I have always thought that there must have been some sort of connection between what these people were feeding and this mare's founder. What these people were doing was CRUEL- the only reason the mare was being kept alive was because they were hoping to get foals from her, because she was an Arab of good lines. But because I needed the money and a place to live (I was a long way from my family, in a strange state with no relatives close by at the time whom I could look to or stay with) I held my silence. When I look back on it now, I wish I had reported these people to HSUS or animal control, because that mare's condition made ME SICK. Do some horses have a genetic predisposition to founder that is made worse when they are fed alfalfa hay? I'm no expert, so I can't answer that empirically, but the anecdotal evidence I have seen suggests it, for sure.

Have a good weekend yourself !!

Answer 5

I do know that alfalfa creates problems with enteroliths, am acquainted with two show horses with chronic colic, surgery, and the discovery of stones in their system......I've seen the results with my own eyes...enough so that I will not feed alfalfa to a horse that I am not showing (If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck).

.......feral horses survive on grasses that our domesticated horses will not touch.  Alfalfa hay and processed grains are not part of their feed program.  Their feet are also better than any domesticated horses'.

I know that pasture grazing will lower the risk for stones.

My two mags for horse health are Equus and The Horse...just love both of them.   Cutting edge horse health info.  

I always have a concern for show horses that are on alfalfa...alfalfa puts the bloom on these horses but the problems with colic, the horses that just can't handle alfalfa, (I have one that can't handle it...too rich for his system) and the problems with enteroliths make it hardly worthwhile to feed a horse alfalfa who isn't out in the show pen.

http://www.thehorse.com/ViewArticle.aspx...

Answer 6

There is a problem with preliminary studies like that.  They would find the same results if all horses in the area are given more than 50% alfalfa and in that area most are.

Don't get too caught up in preliminary results like that.  They did not run a control yet to find the percentage of horses which eat alfalfa that get stones compared to the percentage that do not eat alfalfa and get stones.

I used to teach a class on scientific research.  You would be surprised how many times preliminary notes and observations are taken as research by the media and even the students doing the observations.

The same thing happened with the West Nile Vaccine.  Field notes indicated that after 8 months a certain percentage of mares that had been pregnant before the vaccination were no longer pregnant.  A New York Newspaper reporter got hold of that and had it published.  It turned out that the same percentage of mares in control groups that were not vaccinated were no longer pregnant after 8 months either.  Some had had their foals and some absorbed.  That is perfectly natural. and the fact the a certain percentage of mares were no longer pregnant had nothing to do with the vaccine.

Here is another silly example to illustrate.

Did you know that pickles are poisonous?  Everyone who even tasted a pickle in 1858 is now dead!  Therefore, pickles must be 100 percent fatal.  How is that for logic?

Wait for the finished results comparing the numbers of various feeding strategies.  It may well end up that it is the lack of adequate grazing or some other factor that simply hit an area that has alfalfa as its primary forage.

Answer 7

I did read about this, and it isn't really that surprising.  there were already good reasons to limit or eliminate alphalfa from horse diets, and people still feed it.  I know of a couple horses that were necropsied after colic deaths and were found to have enteroliths that formed around seeds.

In fact, I thought of that when someone posted a question about feeding horses veggies from the garden.

I've also seen many people impactions that resulted from seed enteroliths, so I could tell everyone to core the seeds out of the apples or the watermelon they feed to horses, but people don't want to hear that, so I mostly leave it alone.  Most people keep doing what is working until they have a problem with it themselves....I'm guessing the alphalfa sales won't go down all that much as the result of this news.

ADD...what Jeff says is true....research that makes it into the news is often poorly validated and unless you have access to the details on how the research was controlled and validated, there's room for skepticism.

Answer 8

That may be, but I've heard a lot of things about alfalfa and have never had any trouble feeding straight alfalfa through the winter.

My dad raises alfalfa hay in a valley in Idaho, and that is literally all his horses eat, year around.  They graze the irrigated fields during summer and during the winter their grazing is supplemented with alfalfa hay.  There is a little grass mixed in, of course, but it is predominantly alfalfa.

He has 20 horses, has raised horses for 45 years, and never had trouble feeding alfalfa.

I'm not trying to start an argument, I'm just pointing out that just because you feed alfalfa doesn't mean your horse will get gall stones.  There's a chance, but not a certainty.