If you don’t have a horse with Cushings disease or Cushings syndrome or whatever they want to call it, it’s so common these days that you’ll probably know someone who does.
Healing and horsemanship go together very strongly if you want to help the Cushings horse to heal.
ONE: Every single horse with Cushings that I have met or heard about – has been the Caretaker type of horse, the one who slows down and freezes when they are afraid or confused and every single one of them has had fear or nervous issues that have been misunderstood because of the quiet way in which they tend to react.
TWO: Being misunderstood causes stress that causes tension that causes all kinds of ill health. We can reverse that stress and achieve phenomenal healing – see our training programs at the bottom of the page.
THREE: Every single one of them has been on a restricted diet because of weight issues or risk of laminitis.
FOUR: Many, many of them have spent a considerable amount of time in a paddock or yard, miserable on their own.
Address these four issues and your horses with Cushings can heal.
You’ll often hear me talk about these wonderful caretaker horses, who slow down or freeze when they are nervous or confused – they internalise their nervousness. I talk about them a lot because the world is full of them, my horse Bobby is one and soooo…. many of them are in trouble.
From the scientific point of view, these horses are producing too much of the stress hormone cortisol – they have broken the “off switch” of the adrenal gland that produces the cortisol. Because these Caretaker horses internalize their stress, we often don’t notice it and then it becomes chronic – broken that cortisol off-switch. You can help them fix the stress and repair the switch with the combination of healing and horsemanship work that we do here.
When people feel deprived, even if they are not actually hungry or starving, their metabolism changes so that the person lays in more fat cells – it throws the fat switch to “on”. It is similar for our overweight horses – the more we deprive them, the fatter they get and the harder it is to stop them from getting laminitis and the unhappier they get and the sicker they get too.
I believe… no, this is way beyond belief, I KNOW… that there is a link between the food deprivation that we use for overweight horses and sufferers of chronic laminitis and eventual Cushings disease.
What to do about weight and food intake instead of deprivation, is very much an individual answer for each horse. One possibility is to change our horse’s diet to lots of simple grass hay – as much as they can eat. Or change them to long dry grass instead of the short, stressed, high sugar stuff.
Craving and then overeating, even in horses, is often about missing something important from the diet, which is why I am so… NOT a fan of soaking the sugar and nutrients out of the hay. Gosh that causes some big problems. Get your horse out hand grazing them on the long, dry, uncut grass verges where you find lots of native grasses and so-called weeds that are often very useful herbs of great benefit in both minerals and healing properties. Hand grazing like that can also be quality time bonding together.
Get these horses into company – at least one other horse – preferably a consistent little herd of horses who have similar feed requirements. If you only have one overweight horse, join together with someone else with a horse of similar requirements and give them enough room for them to run about and play – the more the better!
I find a laneway works well. I leave the tree guard to grow to long dry grass and that’s where I put my miniature horses in spring time when I am simply not game to leave them out with the main herd.
So how do you know what individual answers you need for YOUR horse?
There’s a whole raft of training programs here that start at $20 and go up to $10,000 for the professionals – you won’t need the professional one to solve this problem though! Journey to Feel has a “choose your price” option that starts at $20 if you’re short of money and it’s a great place to start getting a deep connection to and two way understanding with your horse. You’ll find it and the other training programs here. Training programs
Hi Jenny I just found your website and find it very interesting.I was wondering if you could help me with my lovely horse Riley. He is a lovely natured horse always try’s hard but then gets really tense trough the back and loses his swing . In the float he goes in and out fine . But during he can at times lose it. He starts rocking back and forth. Then after a while he will settle and then starts up again. He loves food is always hunger and a good doer. I hope you can help us I love this horse to bits and hate to see him so upset. Kind regards Cherie
This is SUCH a big question with a many multiples of possibilities Cherie. 🙂 He will have some fears that are causing him to get tense through the back that may be caused by many complex factors both ridden and not even related to being ridden. In the case of the float, there are lots of possibilities there too – from a divider too close to the ground so he can’t spread his feet, to him being more scared in there than you realize and yet so obliging as to get on anyway. I have also seen people’s driving, too jerky in the gear changes and breaking and cornering too hard – all these things could cause that kind of reaction too. Another possibility is that he in the past been floated too far for his comfort and is having an anxiety attack about that happening again. I like to unload every two to three hours and have a bit of a graze, then load them up and continue the trip for absolutely no more than 6 hours. From that time onwards they are risking travel sickness and that can be SUCH a gobsmackingly huge deal that we do not ever want to go there.
Grab those free lessons The Nine Keys to Happiness with Your Horse and see if you like the approach here – specially the way that we deal with fear and anxiety – and come back to me and we can chat about a path forwards that will deal with all of those issues. 🙂
Also, I see that you have come in on my website about Cushings. Do you think he has Cushings? Because in that case, he is most likely a Caretaker horse (you’ll read about them in the Nine Keys) and they are usually a lot more anxious than people realize.