No More Salt Blocks!
By Joe Camp
I had never been licked by a horse before. Lots of sniffing, nudging, lip nibbling, and just hanging out close by. But never a full-blown, full-tongue lick on the arm. Especially by a mustang who’s never even had a lead rope on. But one day, back when we lived in California, Noelle gave me several licks on the arm. This was back when she was not yet living out with the rest of the herd. It was a particularly hot day and I wondered aloud if it might be a salt issue. Then, I suddenly realized that when we set up her paddock we had forgotten the salt.
One of the many things I asked about when our first three horses landed in our yard was, “Aren’t we supposed to have a salt block?” “Of course,” was the unanimous answer. “Can’t hurt.” The reason it’s in a block, we were told, is so the horse can’t get too much. You know how bad salt can be for high blood pressure and other things. We bought it because that’s all the information we had. That was before we learned that horses are quite good at monitoring what they need and ingesting enough to cover their needs if given the option to do so. And it was before we learned how much horses need their salt, especially under certain pasture conditions. And before we discovered that
there isn’t even a smidgen of proven truth to the wives tale about salt and high blood pressure. And before we discovered that the problem with salt and/or minerals in a block is that with blocks is that there is no way horses can “lick” enough of what he needs from a block because the horse, unlike the cow, does not have a sandpaper tongue to scrape away the goodies locked in the block. These blocks were originally designed for cattle and they more or less migrated into the horse world. A horse simply cannot do enough licking to serve the needs of his body. Now I’ve discovered that even the cow can’t get enough out of a block during times of acute need. Dr W. W. Swerczek, DVM, PhD says: “Most cattlemen assume they have adequate sodium if cattle are exposed to salt blocks. Cattle and other herbivores cannot obtain enough salt or sodium from hard salt blocks during periods of acute needs. The most dominant animals in a herd will horde a salt block and the remainder will leave without any salt. Even the animals that horde the block cannot consume enough salt to neutralize the acute excessive dietary nitrate during periods of acute stress to forages, like frosts and freezes to high nitrogenous forages.“
Photo by Jodie Otte Photography