Health Feature of the Month: Preventing Sand Colic
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Sand Colic: A Preventable Problem
By Sandi Lieb, PhD, Associate Professor Emeritus University of Florida
In the sandy soil areas in the Southern U.S. as many as 30% of all equine colic cases have been traced to sand buildup in the GI tract. Poor management practices have been suggested as a major factor in these types of colic; however, few controlled experiments have been done to determine sand intake causes, or the effectiveness of the management and veterinary sand removal methods being used. This article summarizes seven separate trials which were conducted over a 5 year period at the University of Florida, including a 12 month field study and many controlled experiments with 4-8 horses each. Sand intake and feeding or treatment conditions were strictly controlled and voluntary sand intake or fecal sand output levels were measured. Here is a brief description of the trials and their results:
Farm Field Trial
Grab fecal samples were taken from more than 30 horses on five local farms over a one year period. There was a high horse to horse variation in the percentage of sand found in the feces, with some horses having consistently higher amounts. There were no seasonal or farm differences. Some of the farms were feeding their horses in buckets or tubs on open sandy areas. No sand colic cases were reported during the collection period.
Controlled Sand Removal Trials
Controlled sand removal trials using mature horses (8 horses in two trials): Six treatments were tested overthe two trials including dosing with mineral oil via stomach tube, single feeding of wheat bran, feeding of psyllium either one time or daily for 6 days, and feeding 1.5 or 2.5% of body weight (BW) hay. In all cases the “control” or basic feed ration was the 1.5% of BW of coastal bermudagrass hay (15-20 lbs for 1,000 to 1,300 lb horses) and sweet feed supplementation which met each animal’s nutrient requirements. Sand (300 or 500g, approx. .7 or 1 lb) was given with water to each horse via stomach tube just before the oil, bran and psyllium treatments were applied. There were no statistical differences between these treatments or the control in their ability to remove the sand. Sand outputs peaked mostly on day 2 post-dosing/treatment and 45-95% of the sand was recovered in the feces by 5-6 days post-dosing. The horse to horse variation was large; however, the ‘control’ (hay only) treatments consistently removed the greatest total quantity of sand and the 2.5% BW hay treatment removed almost twice the sand (95%) by day 6, as the other treatments. Feeding of psyllium 2x daily (about .5 lb of psyllium per day) for 6 days appeared to suppress sand passage through the tract. Psyllium has been reported in the veterinary literature since the 1970’s as being useful to remove sand from horses’ GI tracts; however, a review of these reports show that each of them were of a few individual animals already exhibiting sand load symptoms and each was treated by stalling and dosing with psyllium. No control animals were ever used to compare with the psyllium in any of these reports. The trials reported here indicate that if the animal is removed from further sand intake then normal feeding (with or without any treatment) would remove the sand. One recent paper with a control but a different technique found that psyllium had no effect on sand removal just as our trials have found.
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