Archive for the ‘Horses’ Category

Outlast Supplement pH Experiment

Friday, July 14th, 2017

See Purina® Outlast Supplement in action. Watch as Dr. Robert Jacobs, Purina PhD research equine nutritionist, demonstrates how a horse’s stomach would respond to a feeding of Outlast Supplement.

In this short experiment, Purina® Outlast Supplement raises the pH level of a simulated equine stomach environment from a harmful pH of 2 to a safe pH level of 6.3 in just two minutes, outperforming alfalfa and competitive products on the market. Ready to put Outlast Supplement to the test? Start your Feed Greatness™ Challenge at www.feedOutlast.com.

Welcome to the Equine Research Unit here at Purina Animal Nutrition Center. My name is Dr. Robert Jacobs, a research equine nutritionist, and today, I’m here to demonstrate our new gastric support supplement, Outlast.

Outlast is designed to provide gastric support and help comfort the horse’s stomach. The horse is an herbivore, designed to consume forages eighteen to twenty hours a day. Modern management practices, however, require that we feed our horses concentrate and meal feed them throughout the day. Outlast is designed to support the overall health of the gastric environment in the horse.

So today what we’re going to do is we’re going to demonstrate how the horse’s stomach would respond to a feeding of Outlast. In this beaker here we have a constantly churning fluid at a pH right around 2, which is the constant pH of the horse’s stomach when they’re at a fasting state. Additionally, we’ve heated this environment to approximately 37 degrees Celsius, which would be the internal body temperature of the horse.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to take Outlast, our gastric support supplement and grind it up as you can see what we’ve done here to stimulate the chewing that the horse would do before this supplement would reach the gastric environment or into the stomach of the horse, and we’re going to put this into that gastric environment, and we’re going to show you exactly what happens to the pH.

So what I want to do is focus on this pH meter. We put this gastric buffer into this gastric environment. So what we’ll do is we’ll simply put this in here. We’ll give it a little bit of a mix, again to help stimulate what would happen in the horse’s stomach, and we’ll set this timer here to about two minutes.

We’ve done a significant amount of lab work here at the Purina Animal Nutrition Center, as well as at universities throughout the country to better understand how Outlast buffers the equine stomach. We’ve done in vitro trials similar to what you can see in this setup here as well as in vivo trials, in which we’ve fed this supplement to hundreds of horses and examined what happens with the pH of the gastric environment as well as what happens to the overall health of the horse’s stomach.

So what we’re going to do is we’ll wait until this gets to its buffering capacity at about two minutes and we’ll take another pH reading to see exactly how this gastric support supplement works.

So you can see here, after two minutes we’re going to take another pH reading on our simulated gastric environment. So, we look here at this pH meter, and you can see after only two minutes, the pH has already risen to approximately 6.3. Well above the threshold of four which we generally consider a buffered stomach environment.

Now remember, a higher pH is indicative of a lower acidity in the stomach which is what we would want to see to provide the gastric comfort and the support that Outlast is designed to do.

Outlast gastric support supplement is different from some of the other products that are currently on the market, in that it acts quicker, in only two minutes you can see the pH rose substantially; it acts longer, as we saw in our in vivo as well as our in vitro trials; and has a significantly higher buffering capacity and buffering ability, as is demonstrated here in these test tubes.

In these test tubes, you can see a representation of how much acid a single serving of any one of these supplements including Outlast is able to buffer in a simulated gastric environment. You can see here in these tubes that Outlast is able to buffer a significantly larger quantity of acid than even alfalfa or some of the other competitive products on the market as is demonstrated by these different colored tubes.

Free Choice Water For Horses

Friday, June 17th, 2016

Water For HorsesFree Choice Water For Horses

A variety of “old horsemen’s tales” once advised withholding water from horses under particular circumstances. For example, many people still adhere to the notion that offering cold water to a hot, sweating horse will cause colic.

However, researchers now know that offering a cool drink to a hot horse does no harm, and it will help him recover from exertion more quickly. In fact, ensuring that horses have access to a ready supply of fresh, clean water is one of the best ways to reduce the risks of impaction colic, especially in those kept primarily on dried forage.

Make sure that every horse has access to the water you supply. Low-ranking herd members may be bullied away from troughs, and arthritic horses may be unwilling to climb down steep streambeds. Providing more than one source of water can help remedy situations like these.

Feeding is one of the most emotionally gratifying things we do for our horses. Who doesn’t enjoy hearing expectant whinnies give way to the sound of contented munching? And yet our very human need to nurture them sometimes conflicts with their very equine need to simply roam and graze. Finding the balance between the horse’s natural way of eating and the demands of domesticated life will help ensure that he will remain healthy for years to come.

Source: Equisearch, Laurie Bonner

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