Flies can be a major nuisance to your horse during the summer months, and can also carry diseases and cause allergic reactions. But your horse doesn’t have to simply put up with the winged pests causing him stress, skin reactions, or worse.

Not much can gross out a horse person. We happily pick out hoofs, observe the quality of manure, scrape bot eggs off our horses’ legs, and get a weird sense of satisfaction from an expressed abscess. But ticks… ticks are just nasty.

Horses exposed to fire smoke can suffer respiratory injury of varying degrees, ranging from mild irritation to severe smoke inhalation-induced airway or lung damage. Knowing what is normal versus concerning can help to know whether a veterinarian should evaluate your horse.

With exercise, the body temperature rises. This heat must be dissipated, or the horse will literally “cook”! The body cools itself through the evaporation of sweat, so sweating is especially important for the exercising horse. The sweat contains water and electrolytes, or salts. The main electrolytes are sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. When the body loses water and electrolytes, various functions are compromised, and the health of the horse can be at risk. To ensure that your horse remains healthy, learn to effectively replace both the water and electrolytes — and the electrolytes must be replaced in balance with what has been lost.