Anuario Raza Polo Argentino 2014-2015 | Page 249

Equine Nutrition

Feed During the Raising of Animals

Dr. Eduardo M. Beccar Varela
In this edition of the Argentine Polo Pony Breeder’ s Association Year Book, Bill Buchanan was given the opportunity to speak with Dr. Eduardo Beccar Varela for the purpose of analyzing different aspects on how to feed horses from the moment they are born until they are fully developed.
In your profession how did the issue of Equine nutrition come your way?-It crossed my path because throughout my profession I specialized in orthopedic surgery and my main field of action was at stud farms. I have been a veterinary surgeon for 40 years. From Capitán Sarmiento I visited most of the stud farms( of all breeds) when I began my practice as a“ rural” orthopedic radiologist. Already by 1978 I was taking X-rays of foals and diagnosing conformation problems in almost every stud farm in the country. After a few years I was also practicing surgery both in young animals so as to alter deviations, and also in those that were reaching their time as sporting animals and had injuries that could have found their origin during their development period. As I collected data on a great many cases and associated them naturally with their growth processes, I automatically felt the need to discover more about the relationship between these pathologies and the way the animals were fed in pastures on the different farms. In 1989 I decided to find theoretical answers to describe what I was seeing in practice. There was a contradiction that I needed to find the answer to. The stud farms that most wanted to improve the development of their litters were those that had the greater amount of problems( OCD; acquired postural deviations; epiphysitis etc.) It was necessary to learn to do things right. The answer was not to be found in recipes from the American stud farms, because in traditional breeding areas they do not have the forage available to us and which is, in many cases, the cause of these imbalances. I went to study at Cornell University under Professor H. Hintz, and went on to get work teams together to work with some stud farms, managing to invite nutritionists to come and have a look at our reality( very different from other countries) and learn to use new tools in order to reach conclusions and propose solutions. It is a fascinating subject, as are all those that we never completely discover, and the workplace is almost always very gratifying: farms and horses.
-What do Polo pony breeders consult you about most frequently?-They consult me on several issues, but definitely the most frequent boils down to:“ We have adequate genetics; we are providing them with food and we can’ t manage to obtain the development achieved by some at the age of between 18 and 24 months.” Most consultations begin with this.
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