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Dehydration in Horses: Causes, Signs, and Treatment
Dehydration in horses occurs when the body loses fluid, through sweating, diarrhea, illness, or inadequate water intake, faster than it is replaced. Because horses are large-bodied animals that rely on sweating as their primary cooling mechanism, fluid requirements are substantial. An adult horse at rest needs twenty to forty liters of water daily; that requirement…
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Natural Selection
Natural selection is the process by which heritable traits that improve an individual survival or reproductive success become more common in a population over successive generations, while traits that reduce fitness become rarer. It operates without deliberate human intent, driven instead by environmental pressures: predator pressure, food availability, terrain, climate, and disease. In horses, natural…
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Louse
A louse (plural: lice) is a wingless, dorsoventrally flattened parasitic insect of the order Phthiraptera that completes its entire life cycle, egg, nymph, and adult, on the body surface of a specific host species. Lice are highly host-specific; equine lice infest only horses, donkeys, and mules and do not transfer to humans or other mammalian…
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Selective Breeding
Selective breeding is the deliberate choice of specific sires and dams based on heritable traits the breeder wants to increase, speed, conformation, temperament, coat color, disease resistance, with the effect of raising the frequency of favorable alleles across successive generations. It is the mechanism by which every established horse breed was created and the primary…
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Sedative
A sedative is a drug that reduces a horse’s anxiety, lowers its responsiveness to stimuli, and may produce drowsiness or light anesthesia depending on dose. Equine sedatives are used for procedures requiring the horse to stand quietly, veterinary examinations, minor wound treatment, routine dental work, farriery on a difficult horse, trailer loading in extreme cases,…
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Luster
Luster refers to the sheen and reflective quality visible on a horse’s coat when the individual hair shafts are smooth, clean, and well-nourished. A coat with good luster has a glossy, light-catching surface that is recognized as one of the most visible external indicators of a horse’s overall health and nutritional status. The optical property…
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Roughage
Roughage is the high-fiber plant material, hay, pasture grass, straw, and similar forages, that forms the nutritional and digestive foundation of a horse’s diet. Horses are hindgut fermenters with a digestive system evolved for continuous consumption of fibrous plant material; the cecum and large colon depend on a steady supply of roughage to maintain microbial…
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Splayed
Splayed feet, also described as splay-footed or toe-out, is a conformation fault in which the front hooves turn outward from the vertical axis of the limb, with the heels pointing inward. The deviation can originate at the knee, the medial joint stress from outward rotation, or the hoof itself. When the rotation is present from…
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English Hack
The English Hack is not a distinct breed but a horse type recognized in British equestrian tradition as the ideal pleasure riding horse: refined, elegant, well-mannered, and possessed of smooth, ground-covering gaits that make riding both comfortable and aesthetically pleasing. The word “hack” in British usage originally referred to any horse used for ordinary riding…
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Progeny
Progeny is the collective term for the offspring of a horse. A sire or dam produces progeny over successive breeding seasons, and evaluating that progeny, their conformation, soundness, gaits, and competition results, is the primary method of assessing a horse’s genetic value as a breeding animal. In breed registries and auction catalogs, progeny records list…