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Overview of Horse Digestion and G.I. Tract Anatomy. Digestion is the process of breaking down food and absorbing nutrients. Each part of the horse’s digestive system serves a different purpose, and each area has unique health concerns.
Digestion of feeds begins when food enters the mouth. The horse chews reducing feed particle size and mixing it with saliva to begin the digestive process. Saliva acts as a lubricant to provide easier passage through the esophagus and buffers acid in the stomach.
The horse’s digestive system has two parts: the foregut and the hindgut. The foregut consists of the mouth, esophagus, stomach, and small intestine. Digestion of proteins, fats and hydrolyzable carbohydrates (such as those found in grain) takes place mainly in the foregut.
Your horse’s food goes on quite a journey from mouth to muck-heap – we follow the twists and turns of the equine digestive system to explain how it all works. Put simply, the digestive system is responsible for turning food into the energy that’s required for the body to function.
Amazingly, horses can digest and absorb relatively high levels of fat in their diets despite not having a gallbladder. Bicarbonate is also released into the duodenum to buffer pH, allow enzymes to function effectively, and protect intestinal linings.
Horses breakdown these structural components of roughages via a microbial population in a modified part of the digestive system called the cecum. The cecum is located behind the stomach in the digestive system. It is for this reason that horses are also called hind-gut fermenters.
Equines are herbivores and have a complex digestive system to break down and digest nutrients from plant material. Horses forage for 18 hours per day 1 because their digestive system only needs a small amount of food passing through it continuously to remain healthy.
Many factors can influence the digestibility of nutrients in the complex digestive tract of the horse. These include type of feedstuff, level of maturity of forage, method of processing feedstuffs, quantity fed, frequency of feeding, rate of passage and age and individual differences among horses.
The horse's digestive tract is designed to process small meals, obtained by eating most of the date, as in a natural grazing situation. Many domesticated horse’s intake is restricted to two meals a day. This practice is the basis of many digestive issues in our equine population.
In this three part series we dissect the equine gastrointestinal (GI) tract to gain a better understanding of the digestive process and learn how we should keep our horses, and what feeding management we should follow to maintain optimal (digestive) health in our horses.