Electing Electrolytes
- Consider electrolyte supplements for times when your horse may lose important salts through sweating.
- Not all horses need electrolytes, so ask your vet, or closely monitor your own horse's needs.
- Steer clear of mixtures with too much sugar, which can interfere with electrolyte assimilation.
- Choose powder, gel or paste products depending on your horse's eating and drinking habits.
How Electrolytes Work
Electrolytes are body salts that break down into positive or negative ions when they dissolve. Those ions let cells "fire up" to do their job. Different salts are necessary for different cells, but they all work together in a precise balance that controls nearly every function of the body-especially nerves and muscles. They also help signal to the horse that he is thirsty.
Electrolytes are primarily lost through sweat when horses (or people) overheat, overwork or overstress. Although we tend to think of sweat as hot and annoying, it is actually a form of natural air conditioning that lowers body temperature by evaporating on the skin. When horses overheat, blood transfers heat from the body core up closer to the skin, which is being cooled by that evaporating sweat. This is why photographs of fit, sweaty horses during or after major exercise show bulging, hard-working blood vessels.
In a frustrating cycle, the hotter the horse gets, the more blood is needed to lower the body temperature. But some of the liquid needed for that cooling sweat is pulled from guess where? This lowers blood volume. So, as the demand for blood volume increases, the amount of fluid available for that blood decreases as more and more water is sweated away.
High humidity can produce buckets of visible sweat, but dry heat can be just as dangerous because evaporation may occur so rapidly that you might not realize how much moisture your horse is actually losing. Astoundingly, a horse that is working hard in hot weather or is highly stressed can lose more than three gallons of water in an hour.
That sort of loss maintained over many hours without electrolyte support and a great deal of water produces dehydration and electrolyte imbalance. Depending on how severe this gets, the result can be extreme fatigue, muscle cramps, colic, heart problems, interference with communications between brain, nerves and muscles, and eventual collapse.
The all-too-true "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink" makes things worse. Exercise can suppress a desire to drink, even though the body might be dehydrating. You can make yourself drink while exercising, even if you don't feel thirsty, because you have been taught to do so. Some endurance riders actually teach their horses to drink on command.
Could you just slip your horse some of your bright blue power drink? Well, he may or may not enjoy a swig, but horses and people use different levels of different electrolytes so it is probably a better idea to give him what he really needs.
