These days most horse owners are clued-up enough about horse health care to recognize insulin-resistance in their equine friends.

The insulin-resistant horse is the laid-back easy keeper who gains weight if he catches even a whiff of grain. He’s also the one with the cresty neck, elevated levels of insulin and triglycerides in the blood, and pockets of fat in all the wrong places!

When a horse is diagnosed as being insulin-resistant, many horse owners immediately embark on a drastic horse health care regimen that involves a dry lot and a starvation diet. While this approach may keep your horse safe from the serious consequences of insulin resistance, it can also produce a very unhappy horse with a poor quality of life!

12 Ways to Horse Happiness
Instead of using the starvation approach, there are 12 ways you can keep your insulin-resistant horse both healthy AND happy:

1. Regular exercise
2. Monitor your pasture and allow turn out only in certain conditions
3. Mow your pasture
4. Fertilize your pasture naturally
5. Feed probiotics
6. Feed minerals
7. Feed small amounts of food with low glycemic indexes
8. Allow grazing with a muzzle
9. Add fat to the diet
10. Make your horse work for his food, water, and supplements
11. Plant native grass pastures
12. Feed antioxidants

If some of these approaches sound counter-intuitive, then read the full article to get the details on each of these horse health care approaches. The full article also covers the basics of insulin-resistance.

How to Have a Healthy Happy Insulin-Resistant Horse

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