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"What is a Super Horse

and How Do You Build One?"

A super horse has achieved peak condition; you can

see it---and make no mistake---he or she can feel it!

This is the place for people who ‘get’ horses and want theirs happy, healthy, productive and protected; for people who want tools that help their horses do better with less effort and zero risk. And most importantly, this is the place where horse and human both win.

What is a Super Horse?

The human side of bringing forth the super horse requires respect, skill and understanding; it is greatly advanced by fairness and light hands. The horse side involves breeding, training and nutrition; it is expressed by devotion and capacities that deepen and widen.

The characteristics of a super horse…

He is calm, cooperative and responsive.

His muscles are sculpted and supple.

His hooves are hard and smooth.

His haircoat is even, soft and lustrous.

His eyes are kind, clear and bright.

He is alert, affectionate and a joy to be around.

He has plenty of strength and stamina for his job.

And, when you ask him for more, he gives you a whole new gear.

"The body heals itself and nutrition provides the resources

to accomplish the task."

Roger J. Williams, PhD

NUTRITION AGAINST DISEASE, 1971

Simple solutions to profound problems is what you’ll find here. This site is about something so potent and pure, it can remake a horse, literally. The tools you'll find here will not only influence your horse's current health and performance, but will bear on your resources and his or her quality of life for years to come.

What’s Ailing Your Horse?

Despite the information age and the technology revolution, horses still contend with the same ailments that have plagued them for generations. Confinement, feed choices and overuse of drugs are the primary culprits of compromised mental and physical health for the noble and sensitive equine.

Keep in mind that by the time a symptom is evident, damage has already been done. Drugs manage symptoms, they do not heal the condition(s) behind the symptoms. There's a big difference between managing a symptom and supporting a cure.

Here’s a look at the five most costly and pervasive ailments gathered from a recent survey of leading horse health publications.

Colic

Colic kills more horses than anything else. Yet most instances of this painful condition can be prevented with one or two simple and cost-saving changes to horse management. Further gut weakness frequently results from drugs used to treat colic. For many horses, gut weakness becomes a life sentence. This can be reversed.

Ulcers

Ulcers are another ailment afflicting most horses today. In clinical trials, 11 to 93 percent of horses had gastric ulcers. Widely used synthetic food additives and drugs worsen ulcers and compromise all aspects of digestion. The link between anti-inflammatory drugs, internal bleeding and ulcers have now been well established. Ulcers can be healed and prevented without drugs and expensive additives.

Infertility

When an animal is pushed beyond natural limits, its systems frequently respond by shutting down. Shutdown occurs when a horse's internal burdens and system stresses begin to manifest in external weaknesses. Infertility is just one symptom of a horse that has been environmentally overwhelmed. Many horse owners resort to drugs for breeding convenience only to find that they leave the horse in worse shape than before. Drugs, continued stress and inadequate nutrition compound the problem resulting in stallions without sufficent sperm and mares without the ability to conceive or carry to term. Infertility can be turned around.

Laminitis

Too much grain, carbohydrate overload, is the most common cause of laminitis, in which the hard structures of the hoof become inflamed and the senstive laminae underneath become engorged with oxygen-starved blood. If not corrected quickly, the entire hoof collapses as the hard structures dissolve and the horse's weight begins to bear on soft parts that were never meant to bear it. In acute cases, laminitis can be a death sentence. The hoof is slower to heal than muscle and bone, but it can heal completely and many cases of laminitis will prove to be completely resolved once the hoof has completely grown out.

Osteoarthritis

When osteoarthritis strikes, you find out what your horse’s joints are really worth. Osteoarthritis is commonly caused by overwork or overtraining—by uncommon force applied to normal cartilage or by normal force applied to damaged cartilage. An immune-system disease that targets connective and soft tissue, osteoarthritis produces painful inflammation and persistent lameness. It can and does end careers. Unburdening the horse's immune system can reverse this condition.

How You Can Tap Your Horse’s Full Potential

You can tap your horse’s full potential by creating an environment in which his body heals itself. This is the simple truth of equine physiology. The horse's natural state is health, vitality and resiliency. Even so, horses in all environments face routine conditions and unexpected circumstances that take an organic toll on them. For example…

•

Dressage horses need strength, stamina and fine control

•

Cutting, reining and rodeo horses need mass, muscle and

lightning-fast reflexes

•

Pulling and racing horses need cardiovascular fitness,

supple musculature, structural integrity and raw power

•

Young stock needs nutrition that supports their soft tissue without

burdening their growing skeletons

•

Breeding stallions need high motility and structural strength to

protect their loins from stress

•

Broodmares need high fertility and whole-body integrity to ensure

a healthy pregnancy, foaling and lactation

•

Older and special needs horses also need whole horse nurture

and profound nutrition

When your horse’s mental and physical reserves are sufficiently nourished, their energy is full to the brim and at the ready. Sufficient nourishment is about quality, not quantity. The more nourishment in the feed, the less feed is needed. When your horse's nutritional needs are met is when you watch in awe as they transform into a super horse before your eyes.

What Motivates You to Build a Super Horse?

Are you looking for cost containment, breakthrough performance, increased fertility or do you want to take your horse to the next level?

Whatever you’re looking for, you may find the answer you’ve been looking for right here. When you appreciate the science behind this class of product, you’ll understand the edge they will give your horse no matter what your motivation.

Health status = state of well being = quality of life =

efficiency of systems = capacity for performance

What you’re about to read is the revelation of two equine Superfoods, one ancient and one modern. Superfoods tap the inherent power of the body to renew and repair itself. They do this by nourishing the horse at the cellular level. If nutrition doesn’t get to the cell, it’s not much more than calories. When your horse is nourished in this way, amazing things happen because his body is being built from the inside out.

Introducing Equine Superfoods

Support health at the deepest level and you have tapped the biological source of renewal---the cell

Superfood nutrition supports the engineering and design encoded in the cells and the genes that govern cellular metabolism and biochemical synthesis. This is the stuff of creation and adaptation. By providing this level of nourishment consistently, you direct key ingredients for healing activity to the physiological source of life, the cell.

Supporting and improving cellular activity influences your horse's health in these ways:

promotes longevity

balances metabolic processes

enhances nutrient absorption

increases energy and vitality

corrects persistent disease or wound states

facilitates deep relaxation

mitigates stress and trauma

builds and fortifies the immune system

speeds and supports recovery

Such profoundly beneficial activity is achieved by few modalities.

To be recognized as a Superfood, a substance must be found to be so nutritionally dense that it delivers nutrition to the cell and thereby supports not just maintenance, but rejuvenation. To put it another way, the primary mechanism at work here is that Superfoods don’t just maintain the body, they support profound biological renewal and regeneration through unsurpassed nutritional quality and delivery.

This class of nutrition supports chemical reactions that produce therapeutic changes throughout the body. Cellular nutrition enhances metabolism—this is especially significant for horses’ sensitive digestive systems—and fosters overall physical and mental well-being.

The body and the mind of the horse must be broadly and deeply nurtured to produce a supremely healthy and resilient individual. There are few shortcuts to this state of being and none that don’t jeopardize the horse. Pain-masking and performance-enhancing drugs have long been liberally administered to get a horse into or through an event. We’ve all seen those moments in the arena and on the racetrack when drugs or heavy training result in tragedy. There are other unnecessary events that unfold behind the scenes every day.

There is a better way.

Superfoods and Drugs

Have you used or considered using drugs to enhance your horse’s performance? Many people do for reasons of convenience and expediency. The two most widely used are steroids and NSAIDs. There is a place for allopathic medication in the treatment of disease and injury. It is vitally important for pain relief, but many conditions that advance to a tipping point can be prevented by simple, cost-effective changes to horse management taken beforehand.

Anabolic Steroids

Steroids get the horse juiced up enough to do the job. Steroids are known to produce aggression because of their affect on hormone balance. Steroids produce a startle response not unlike an adrenaline rush. This allows a racehorse to explode out of the starting gate or an eventing horse to sail over difficult jumps. All of this happens at great cost to the horse's organs and skeleton.

After the high, comes the crash. The horse is poorer after the administration of steroids than before. Whereas with superfoods, the horse is better. When steroids are used short-term, the horse may recover somewhat over time. When steroids are used long-term, the horse may be so irretrievably damaged that his useful life is over. The most common side effects of steroids are skeletal disintegration, heart failure, liver failure and infertility. For a comparison of steroids and Superfoods, see the SeaBuck and Equi-BuildER pages.

Non-steroidal Anti-inflammatories

Phenylbutazone (commonly referred to as bute), flunixin, ketoprofen and banamine are well known NSAIDs. This class of drug is typically administered to keep a working horse on the job or to get a performance horse through an event by reducing inflammation and pain. Like steroids, the impact of NSAIDs on the health of a horse corresponds directly to the extent to which it is used. The most common side effects of NSAIDs include gastrointestinal inflammation and ulceration. Foals and horses subjected to long-term treatment with NSAIDs are most at risk. For a comparison of NSAIDs and Superfoods, see the SeaBuck and Equi-BuildER pages.

There are alternatives now proven to be not just cheaper, safer and surer, but more beneficial, too. The metabolic activity of Superfood nutrition facilitates long-term wellness because it works with the body’s engineering. The body is strengthened at its core--at the cellular level.

Chances are, you already know that it’s much easier to keep your horse healthy than bring him back from disease or injury. The treatment of disease and injury is almost always the most expensive, time-consuming and stressful way to provide health care. The easiest way, for horse and owner, is through Superfood nutrition.

If you have the patience and the wisdom to work with your horse's physiology, you'll see with your own eyes and feel with your own hands what Superfoods can do. You'll see the benefits on your bottom line, too.

Whole Horse Nurture

Most horses are too busy running to regenerate and win.

Both environment and nutrition influence genetic expression. Whole horse nurture is the driving force behind the quest for practices and technologies that produce improved, irrefutable, repeatable results in the lives of horses and humans. Results that can be expected, measured, felt and seen.

Tragically, many well-meaning individuals have damaged and even killed their horses in the pursuit of more speed, strength or endurance. This does not happen with Superfoods because they work with the horse's biology, not against it. The safe, simple mechanisms of Superfoods exceed the effects of synthetic food additives and drugs. They always have and they always will.

Whole horse nurture produces the true super horse and superfoods are the physiological foundation upon which he is built. The best breeding, training and feeding in the world is incomplete without the profound benefits of liberty, herd life and human kindness.

“You cannot remain unmoved by the gentleness and conformation of a well-bred and well-trained horse—more than a thousand pounds of big-boned, well-muscled animal, slick of coat and sweet of smell, obedient and mannerly, and yet forever a menace with its innocent power and ineradicable inclination to seek refuge in flight, and always a burden with its need to be fed, wormed and shod, with its liability to cuts and infections, to laming and heaves. But when it greets you with a nicker, nuzzles your chest, and regards you with a large and liquid eye, the question of where you want to be and what you want to do has been answered.”

Albert Borgmann

CROSSING THE POSTMODERN DIVIDE, 1992