Marvellous Microbes - Feeding To Enhance Digestive Health

Lisa Elliot MSc, nutritionist at Castle Horse Feeds, offers an insight into what gut microbes are, why they are so important for your horse and how you can help promote the right balance for optimum health and condition.

- Lisa Elliot

Did you know that there are more microbial cells in your horses’ hindgut than tissue cells in their whole body?

These gut microbes have a significant impact on your horse, as along with fibre fermentation they have valuable and beneficial roles within the body.

However, while they can promote good health, certain types of microbes can also negatively affect your horse’s wellbeing and be the cause of disease.

Horses are herbivores and their digestive systems have evolved over many years to consume an almost continuous supply of fibrous feed. This fibre is digested in the hindgut, which represents two major organs – the caecum and colon.

As fibre is complex, the horse’s enzymes cannot break it down, so instead it is broken by billions of microbes living in the hindgut, through a process known as fermentation.

What are microbes?

Put simply, microbes are tiny, microscopic life forms with an enormous influence on all living creatures.

Microbes are everywhere, you can’t avoid them and just like horses, our bodies also house billions of them. Microbes are spread throughout the horses’ digestive tract, but the largest numbers by far are present in the hindgut.

Hindgut microbes include protozoa and fungi but the largest population in the hindgut are bacteria. It is the bacteria that are predominately involved in fermentation.

Microbial types and function

The hindgut bacteria responsible for fermentation can be divided in to three main groups:

Cellulolytic – digest fibre;

Amylolytic and glycolytic –digest starch and sugar and produce lactic acid;

Lactic acid utilising bacteria.