Horse with Colic

Learn about the equine digestive system to make the best choices in what and how to feed your horse.

You’ve just pictured a rough image of your horse’s digestive system. One hundred feet of tube through which everything you feed him travels, with digestion and absorption processes all along the path. That’s a lot of tube. And, when things go right, the system is very efficient. However, so many things happen in those 100 feet, it’s not too surprising that there are quite a few potential problems.

There are also many rules in feeding horses: feed small meals often; feed only high-quality hay; make any feeding changes gradually; never feed cattle feed to horses, etc. Why does feeding your horse seem so complicated, and why so many rules?  The answer lies in the architecture of the horse’s gut i.e. how his unique digestive system is designed.

I’ve always thought understanding how your horse’s digestive system works is more important than trying to memorize all those rules. If you understand the architecture of the gut and how digestion and absorption of nutrients works in horses, you don’t need to memorize anything, it all just makes logical sense. Then, when you’re faced with a new situation, you don’t have to try to remember the appropriate rule, you can just think of what makes sense. That will help you make the best choices in what and how to feed your horse.

The horse’s gut is fairly unique compared to other livestock species. The horse is classified as a nonruminant herbivore: an animal that eats plants and is not a ruminant. Several livestock species are ruminant herbivores, including cattle, sheep and goats. Ruminants have stomachs that are divided into compartments, whereas horses have simple stomachs with only one compartment. Animals with simple stomachs are classified as monogastrics, including horses, pigs, dogs, cats and humans.

With those basic differences defined, let’s look at the horse’s gut. We’re going to start at the beginning, follow it through to the back end and examine what goes on in each section.

The Upper Gut
The gut starts at the mouth, which the horse uses to take in feedstuffs and chew. In horses, a unique aspect of the mouth is that the physical act of chewing stimulates the production of saliva, which is not necessarily the case in other species. To understand the importance of this, think of saliva as lubrication. If your horse doesn’t chew adequately, there will be larger chunks of feed and less lubrication (saliva) to help the feed flow smoothly through the digestive tract.

Providing regular dental care is the first step horse owners can take to help ?ensure adequate chewing. This decreases the risk of digestive tract problems, such as choke, and helps ensure optimal digestion and absorption of nutrients.

The next part of the gut is the esophagus, or throat. The horse’s esophagus is unique in how it attaches to the stomach. The attachment is at such an angle and the muscles are so firm that once the digesta passes that point, it’s not coming back— it’s a one-way trip. The horse normally cannot belch or regurgitate. In fact, if something makes it into the horse’s stomach that should not be there, such as a toxic substance, his stomach would rupture before he could ever regurgitate.

This is different than in cattle. Cows can belch and “chew their cud” (or ruminate) when partially degraded food moves back up the esophagus from the stomach and is then chewed and swallowed again. This allows them to break down less digestible foods so nutrients are more available farther down the tract, which is one of the reasons cattle are better able than horses to utilize poor quality hay.

Now we enter the horse’s stomach. As I mentioned before, the horse has a monogastric stomach, meaning a single compartment or a simple stomach. This single compartment contains primarily digestive enzymes and hydrochloric acid, so feed is degraded by enzymatic digestion.

This is also quite different from cattle, as a cow’s stomach comprises four compartments, with the largest compartment being the rumen. The rumen is a very large bag, large enough to fill a typical wheelbarrow. It contains billions of microorganisms: bacteria and protozoa. When feed enters the cow’s rumen, it is digested (fermented) by the microbes. This accounts for one of the reasons you should feed your horse only products designed specifically for horses and not cattle, because ?microbes are able to digest and utilize some feed components (and some potentially toxic substances) that digestive enzymes cannot.

Another function of microbial fermentation is the digestion of fiber carbohydrates in the diet. Fibers are made of sugars linked together by a bond that requires a microbial enzyme to break. In ruminants, microbes in the rumen break down fibers into volatile fatty acids (VFAs). The VFAs are then absorbed from the small intestine and are an important energy source for the animal. In the horse, these fibers pass through the stomach and small intestine with very little breakdown. This is another reason to feed high-quality hay to your horse. The more fibrous the hay, the less digested it will be in the upper gut (stomach and small intestine) and the fewer nutrients your horse will get out of the hay. Cattle are quite efficient at ?retrieving nutrients even from fairly poor-quality roughages due to the microbial fermentation in the rumen.

One more interesting difference between the equine and bovine stomach is the rate of passage. In cattle, it can easily take 24 to 36 hours for feedstuffs to pass through the entire stomach. In horses, digesta usually passes through the stomach within two hours, though it can be as short as 15-20 minutes. The faster digesta moves, the less efficient digestion processes may be.

Moving on, the next part of the horse’s gut is the small intestine. This is a tube that is about 3 inches in diameter and 60-70 feet long.

As digesta moves through the small intestine, more digestive enzymes are produced, and nutrients are degraded into components that can be absorbed into the bloodstream. In fact, the small intestine is the major site of nutrient absorption: Most if not all of the fat in the diet is digested and absorbed here, soluble carbohydrates (sugars and starch) are primarily digested and absorbed in the small intestine, and it is the only appreciable area of absorption of amino acids from dietary protein. The majority of vitamins and several minerals are also absorbed in the small intestine.
Here again, the rate of passage of digesta through the small intestine is fast, as short as 45 minutes with a maximum rate of about eight hours. In 10 hours, feed has passed all the way through the stomach and small intestine in the horse.

Anything that we can do as horse owners to slow down the rate of passage in the stomach and small intestine can help increase the efficiency of digestion and nutrient absorption. About the only way to do that is to slow down your horse’s rate of intake. Feeding management practices such as placing large, round stones in the feed tub can accomplish that goal; your horse has to pick around the stones, slowing down intake.

Source: Dr. Katie Young, PhD, Land O’ Lakes/Purina Animal Nutrition Equine Nutrition Consultant