Nutrition | EQUINE
30 YEARS OF EQUINE NUTRITION
RESEARCH: WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
Dr. Joe Pagan founded Kentucky Equine Research in 1988 and, in the three
decades following, he and his staff have witnessed the evolution of equine
nutrition and research trends.
Equine nutrition and exercise physiology researcher Joe
Pagan, PhD, formed Kentucky Equine Research (KER)
in 1988. In the three decades following, he and his
staff have witnessed the evolution of equine nutrition
and research trends. At KER’s 2018 Conference, held
Oct. 29-30 in Lexington, he described the research
environment over the past 30 years.
Developmental Disorders
In 1980s Central Kentucky, the Thoroughbred capital
of the world, most equine nutrition research centered
around broodmares, growing horses, and performance
horses—“the do all and end all” in that region of the
country, said Pagan.
While things like equine metabolic syndrome (EMS)
and geriatric health weren’t yet on scientists’ radars,
he said, developmental orthopedic disease (DOD, a
catchall phrase for disease affecting the skeleton of
growing horses) was. This was primarily because flaws
that showed up on the radiographs of yearlings and
2-year-olds at Thoroughbred sales devalued those
horses greatly.
Veterinarians and researchers were trying to pinpoint
DOD’s cause when, in the mid-80s, a bomb was
dropped by a group from Ohio State University
implying that diets deficient in certain trace minerals
were primarily to blame, said Pagan.
“A correlation was found between the level of copper
(which can disrupt normal bone formation) in a
breeding farm’s ration and the incidence of metabolic
bone disease (e.g., DOD) in the farm’s foals,” he
explained. “Suddenly, copper was all anyone cared
about.”
The question that followed was: Should we adjust the
foal’s diet accordingly or the pregnant mare’s? (Because
of the exponential increase in fetal growth during the
last three months of gestation, supplementing mares in
late pregnancy is one way to stock foals with nutrients.)
Out of the “research flare” on this topic came a study
in New Zealand that found mare supplementation to
be most important to the foal’s bone health.
“Since then, the feed industry has universally
embraced the importance of trace mineral fortification
for broodmare and foal feeds,” said Pagan. Over the
next decade, however, DOD continued to be an issue,
“especially in precocious, fast-growing young horses,”
he said. Because certain bone lesions appeared to
• Volume 21 Issue 1 | March 2019 •
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