Free Choice Salt & Other Minerals

In nature, horses will travel miles on a daily basis foraging for food. They will eat different types of grasses/plants, small amounts of grains, some barks and drink from different water sources to meet their nutritional needs. They know what their body needs/craves and will eat what they need to to meet those requirements. As well, in nature horses are getting their minerals from their forage in the form that nature intended.

Our horses are severely limited in how they can balance themselves nutritionally. Often they are kept in small paddocks with little forage, and fed the same type of hay each day and the same type of grain/supplements each day (which often do not have the minerals they need in the right amounts or bioavailability) and they drink from the same water source year round. Often they will exhibit signs of mineral deficiency through things such as eating dirt, chewing bark/wood or cribbing (PICA).

A way to change this is to offer your horse a selection of free choice minerals. Horses will naturally select from free choice minerals and will balance themselves. Sodium, phosphorous, calcium and trace minerals should all be in your basic free choice program. Each should be offered separately so that they do not inhibit one another and so your horse is not forced to take one to get the other (thus causing an imbalance). Mineral balance is important – even a slight excess of one may mean that another mineral cannot be absorbed. You should make sure that your minerals are provided in a bioavailable form (see my previous article on Chelated Minerals - click).

Salt is made of up sodium and chloride. The body is about 0.2% sodium (1/2 in soft tissues and ½ in bones). It also makes up about 93% of your basic mineral elements in blood serum. The ability to contract muscles depends on sodium concentrations. Chloride regulates the acid-base balance of the blood and also aids in digestion. Salt is also a natural carrier for trace minerals such as iron, copper, zinc, cobalt, iodine, selenium and manganese.

Salt is almost always inadequate in your typical forage diet. People try to solve this by offering their horses a salt block. Have you ever noticed the teeth marks on your horse's block from where he has tried to scrape salt off? Salt blocks were designed for cattle who have rough tongues – horses cannot get the amount of salt that they need from a salt block. They will try to scrape amounts off with their teeth, which is difficult and can result in TMG issues. The best idea is to offer your horse a free choice trace mineral loose salt (like Dynamite NTM Salt) – your horse will be able to get as much as he needs easily. The loose salt you buy should be pink or grey in colour, not white.

Phosphorous is another mineral which is often inadequate in a forage diet. As calcium and phosphorous directly balance one another, you should look for a free choice supplement that offers each in a balanced ration (Eg. Dynamite 1-1 and 2-1). A deficiency in calcium may in fact be caused by the availability level of phosphorous.

Trace minerals can also be offered through a free choice supplement such as Izmine.

Stress, injury, seasons, hard work, growth spurts and/or your mare's cycle can trigger increases in consumption of the free choice minerals.

Click here for the Dynamite program of minerals.

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