Did you know that feeding a healthy horse is no different than feeding a compromised horse in order to help her regain health?
It has been ingrained in us to focus our attention on treating disease. Therefore, we’ve become so fixated on defeating diseases that we’ve forgotten that our natural state is health.
Rather than focusing on symptoms or a disease, it’s important to focus on giving the body the tools it needs to regain its own balance and maintain homeostasis. Your horse’s body is intelligent and has the ability to self-regulate. Therefore, it has the ability to heal and prevent most any disease – including those brought on by aging.
The Standard Equine Medical Model
This philosophy is much different than that of the standard equine medical model. The standard model of care is trained to match a disease with a corresponding drug. This can work well in situations like trauma, emergencies, and infections. However, it fails miserably when it comes to chronic disease, or promoting your horse’s health so she will be in a consistent state of great vitality.
The most important principle is this – you want to implement strategies that promote your horse’s health and you want to eliminate variables that do not promote health and wellness. Even if your horse already has a health challenge, you’ll still live by this same principle. As I mentioned in my opening statement, there’s no difference.
A Model for Great Vitality
The problem is this. A health issue – such as equine metabolic syndrome (EMS) – tells you the symptoms of the syndrome, not the underlying causes. Knowing that your horse is EMS is just a starting point. It’s not an answer to the problem. You can apply this to most any health issue down to skin allergies, hoof problems, rain rot, you name it. The way it works is that you want to uncover the countless underlying factors that could cause a condition like EMS. What is counter-productive is the standard model approach which just matches a disease with a drug.
Your horse is an individual and it’s important to treat her that way, not treat the disease. It’s important to get out of the way and support the body’s normal healing mechanism, naturally, instead of directly attacking a disease. The body has different systems and each system has complex interactions. To use narrow minded thinking that a drug is intelligent enough to properly regulate all those systems is an inferior form of medicine.
In order to stay true to the model of promoting your horse’s health, you have to trust in the body’s own healing mechanism.
Keep it soulful,
Stephanie Krahl
CEO and co-founder of Soulful Equine
P.S.
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This is lesson #1 in a series on how natural horse care can help your horse thrive. This series discusses essential natural horse concepts such as how to feed a horse a relatively natural diet, barefoot hoof care, and creating a natural habitat. If you want a thriving equine and you haven’t yet signed up for our free Soulful Guardian™ Basics, you can learn more about it by clicking here.
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