Have a good night, pleasant dreams :)
First, the Purina guy: The COB I've been feeding is probably the wrong thing, but with the added vitamin now, I'm more balanced than I was. Feeding as small a quantity as I do, it is really inconsequential.
Nevertheless, I'm going to switch back to a regular feed that is lower in NSC. I'm torn though, whether to switch to the Equine Senior® or the Mare & Maintenance® Supplement. I like to just have one feed bin for all three horses. Bay is the primary decision factor, Cyn can eat anything and she's easy, so is the pony, I just don't want to feed the pony too much. If I fed the Senior, if I'm feeding less than 3 lbs a day to the horses, they aren't getting a balanced amount of the vitamins/minerals. If I am feeding the high quality hay, like I do now, and I just need to feed a little grain, then the Mare and Maint. might be better, though it's very concentrated, I'd want to feed only about a cup of it at each feeding. I'm not sure which is best, really... they may get fat on that much senior.
Neither the Purina guy or the vet who was there thought sugar or diet had anything to do with the Bungus in Bay's feet. And... he said, it's not as high in molasses as I think, It's lower in NSC than Strategy and the other feeds, so that's not really an issue. It also has oil which adds to it's stickiness.
From the vet, what I learned... That joint supplements ~may~ be helpful, don't hurt anything certainly, but may be worthless. This is not really anything different than my vet has always said, though this vet put a finer point on it. He said not only has it never been proven that anything fed to the horse ever enters the joint, a blind test was done on all the major joint supplements and 11 out of the 20 supplements on the market did not have ANY Chondroitin or Glucosimine in them, and 7 out of the remaining nine had less than was indicated on the label. Only two even had the reported amounts on the label. And of course, they wouldn't tell us which those were. The Nutraceutical industry is completely unregulated, even if you get human grade supplements.
He said the only therapeutic joint therapy was injections right into the joint, or bute.
Bute alternatives also - not proven to do a dang thing. If you really want to help the horse, give Bute when the horse needs Bute. Skip MSM, Buteless, Devil's Claw, and all that.
I have to say I thought I was doing some good feeding Bay a joint supplement, he's never been a stiff arthritic horse, but I thought I was preventing problems by feeding an MSM/Chond/Gluc. supplement. I think I'm going to stop.
And I'm happy to not feel like I should try the other Buteless NSAIDs. I've never had trouble with Bute, and it's proven to work.
Other things I learned. Do fecal tests, either once or twice a year, and learn what the worm load is, May and October. If we've been at the same place, same pasture for a long time, have wormed regularly a long time, and aren't bringing new wormy horses onto the place, there may not be worms there, and we may not need to worm as often as we think... And older horses develop more immunity to worms so they don't need it more often as they age, they may need it less.
Same with vaccines. Do what you think is right, but older horses only rarely come down with many of the immunized diseases. He said the only disease he wouldn't risk not vaccinating even an older horse for is Tetanus. If a horse gets tetanus, they're going to die. Almost everything else, at least for this area, is either very rare or not often fatal. On the other hand, they are very low risk vaccines so it just depends what we want to risk over a few bucks. I won't probably skip vaccines, they just aren't a big deal for me, but I probably won't freak out if they go a little longer than a year. We can wait till the farm call makes sense, we don't need to have the vet out just for shots.
Anyway, that's grist for the mill! Two guy's opinions on some issues! What do you think?