Kerry’s Holistic Hoofcare

Kerry’s Holistic Hoofcare I am offering a service for non-invasive Barefoot Trimming and Rehabilitation of all equines. A few years ago I decided to start a new journey.

That journey has taken me from my love and passion of horses to working with them and to help others care for their equine family. My aim is to keep my horses as close to their natural habitat and environment as possible by treating them holistically, including trim cycles, diet, movement, weight management etc.. I completed my training as an Equine Hoof-Care Practitioner with ACEHP in Tasmania, I

also do ongoing training and study with various courses, clinics and workshops. I do hoof trimming and rehabilitation for all horses, ponies and donkeys.

03/04/2026

🔺 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆 𝗣𝘆𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗱

🥣 Everything we feed our horses provides energy which = calories in one way or another. What is oftentimes overlooked is the fact that there are different types of energy that horses can utilise — three to be exact:

1️⃣ Carbohydrates (Structural and Non-Structual)
2️⃣ Fat
3️⃣ Protein

⚖️ In short, not all calories are created equal… and more importantly, not all calories are used equally by the horse. If we really want to feed for condition, performance, and health — we need to think in terms of an energy hierarchy. And with that, I bring to you…

🔺 The Equine Energy Pyramid

🟩 FOUNDATION: Fibre (Structural Carbohydrates)

This is where the majority of your horse’s energy should come from — and where weight gain should start.

Fibre is fermented in the hindgut, producing volatile fatty acids (VFAs) — the horse’s primary and most natural energy source.

Fibrous feeds support gut health (critical for nutrient absorption), provide “slow-release” energy, and increase calorie intake in a way that is safe and species-appropriate.

My favourite fibre-rich feeds include hay (chaff, hay cubes for the dentally-challenged), grass/pasture, lupin hulls, soy hulls, and beet pulp.

💡 Key takeaway:
If a horse isn’t gaining weight, the first question should always be:
“Are they eating enough fibre?”

🟨 MIDDLE: Non-Structural Carbohydrates + Fat

While sugar and starch (non-structural carbohydrates) fall under the same “carbohydrate” banner as fibre does, this particular energy chain provides fast-release energy that can be useful for performance horses or high level athletes. Most importantly, non-structural carbohydrates are less forgiving on gastrointestinal health if overfed, so should be reserved for those whose workloads truly warrant them.

Contrary to a lot of marketing baloney, oats are the safest high non-structural carbohydrate feed to offer (when needed) as the starch is highly digestible in its natural state. Other cereal grains such as corn, barley, and wheat must be heat-treated (boiled, extruded, micronised) prior to feeding in order to alter the structure of the starch and improve digestibility.

Fat is a highly energy-dense form of calories and on a per gram basis, is higher in calories than carbohydrates are. Like fibre, fats are a source of “cool” energy and are less likely to onset hindgut upset when fed sensibly.

Fat can be a great tool for increasing calorie intake without adding too much bulk to a meal. Some of my favourite fat sources include oil (oh hey, PractiFLAX 👋🏼), oilseeds, and copra meal.

💡 Key takeaway:
Once fibre intake is optimised, fat is your next safest and most effective tool for adding calories. Non-structural carbohydrates should only be considered for performance horses or those with an intensive exercise load.

🟥 TOP: Protein

Yes — protein can be used for energy…But it’s the least efficient and most wasteful way to do it. Before protein can be used for fuel, it must be broken down into amino acids and converted into usable energy which actually costs the horse energy to achieve. Additionally, horses cannot store excess protein as fat/energy so anything not utilised is quite literally peed out on the floor.

High protein feeds should be relied upon to “finish” a diet and provide amino acids that support muscle development, tissue repair, and enzyme production rather than being the first resort for weight gain.

My favourite, quality protein sources to supplement an otherwise high fibre, moderate fat diet include lucerne, lupins, and soybean meal.

💡 Key takeaway:
Feeding extra protein to add weight is like using premium building materials as firewood — expensive and inefficient.

👇🏼 When trying to improve condition or increase energy intake:

1️⃣ Fix the foundation first
→ Increase forage intake (quality and quantity)

2️⃣ Then increase calorie density
→ Add fat (e.g. flaxseed oil, copra meal)
→ Carefully use starch if needed

3️⃣ Only adjust protein if required
→ More does not mean better and is not stored for later
→ Actually costs the horse energy to convert if it doesn’t have adequate calories coming from other, easier to digest energy sources

🖐🏼 Five final fun-facts:

1️⃣ Most feed ingredients will have a fibre, sugar, starch, fat, and protein content — you need to understand why they are in the diet to begin with.

2️⃣ Lucerne can be high in both fibre and protein — the protein component is why it shouldn’t make up the majority of a horse’s forage intake.

3️⃣ Copra meal is not considered a source of quality protein because it is low in some essential amino acids. It is moderate in protein at best and better-utilised for its fat properties.

4️⃣ Beet pulp provides roughly the same amount of calories per kilogram as oats do, but in the form of fibre (structural carbohydrates) rather than sugar and starch (non-structural carbohydrates).

5️⃣ You can’t out-supplement a horse that isn’t eating enough fibre.

02/03/2026

🌾 𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐓𝐨 𝐃𝐨 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐇𝐚𝐲 𝐈𝐬 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐓𝐨 𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐜𝐞

❗️I have now received several messages and phone calls from clients and followers who are simply stuck on what to do regarding either a) hay becoming harder and harder to source or b) hay becoming extremely expensive to purchase due to the rise in production costs, so I've put together some truths and tips which will hopefully help someone.

🐴 I'd like to preface this by saying that I am a huge advocate for hay being a superior and stand-alone roughage source for horses. It provides so many benefits; from supporting psychological health and calming behaviours, to increasing saliva production via mastication, to minimising the risk of gastric ulcers, sand burdens, and colic - If pasture isn't available or sufficient, hay is undeniably the best forage replacement you can offer your horse.

🌱 So with that out of the way, what should we as owners of horses be doing if they do not have access to sufficient pasture and we cannot source enough hay to offer them as an alternative?

• Look for alternative hay types that may be available. If you cannot source your usual grass hay, it is okay to consider cereal hays like oaten *if* your horse does not have any diagnosed health concerns such as a predisposition to ulcers or hindgut acidosis, laminitis, insulin dysregulation etc. While I am not the biggest fan of cereal hay crops for a lot of horses due to their often high non-structural carbohydrate content, the bottom line is that any hay is better than none at all if there is nothing else to graze on.

• If you can only obtain small quantities of hay, do not put it all out at once and expect your horse to know how to ration it out. It may take up more of your time, but putting out portioned piles or nets of hay so you can manage how much your horse eats is a highly effective way of making it last longer. Implementing slow-feeder style hay nets or grazing pods is another very useful way of managing how quickly a horse can polish off their hay.

• Know how much roughage your horse actually needs per day, weigh your hay, and only feed them what you have to. Easy-keeping horses in particular don't need ad libitum access to hay, so don't feel obliged to keep them eating constantly if you're really struggling to source hay. Horses need 1.5-2% of their body weight in roughage per day, but they will happily eat 3%+ if allowed to do so. If hay is scarce, I would recommend aiming for 1.5-2% of the horse's body weight in hay (7.5-10kg for a 500kg horse), slow-fed over a 24 hour period.

• Horses shouldn't go longer than around 3-5 hours (maximum) without ingesting food, so use this guideline to time how often you should be feeding out hay if you cannot afford to leave it out ad libitum. The risk of gastric ulcers and colic is significantly increased if horses are deprived of food for prolonged periods of time, so please make sure they aren't spending more than a few hours on an empty stomach at any given time, including overnight.

• If clean straw is available, consider replacing up to 50% of your horse’s forage intake with some straw which will offer relief to your hay stores without compromising on gastrointestinal function. Keep in mind that straw is typically higher in indigestible fibre and lower in nutritive value than hay, so it is important to keep an eye on your horse’s fluid balance (hydration), manure consistency, and body condition score as impactions, dehydration, and weight loss are common symptoms of too much indigestible fibre relevant to digestible fibre in the intake.

• Where hay is just simply not available to purchase, you can start looking at some fibre sources that are somewhat "hay replacements." Feeds like chaff, hay cubes, beet pulp, lupin hulls, and soy hulls are suitable hay alternatives if that is what it comes to. It's important to remember that horses are trickle-feeders, and this means that they are physiologically designed to be intaking roughage at a rather slow rate. The stomach capacity of a horse is quite small and makes up only around 10% of the whole digestive system, so feeding 5kg of chaff in the morning and 5kg of chaff in the evening is not an effective way of managing your horse's roughage requirements. Again, it may take up more of your time, but providing a horse with 3-5 bucket meals that contain lots of fibre per day may just help reduce how much hay you need to feed out in a 24-hour period.

🐎 Feeling overwhelmed? Here are the important bits:

1. 1.5-2% of body weight in roughage per day.

2. No longer than 3-5 hours without food.

3. Small and regular meals rather than large and infrequent ones.

4. Substituting up to 50% of your horse’s forage intake with straw may relieve the pressure of hay restraints without compromising on gastrointestinal function.

5. Don't be hard on yourself if you need to implement different hay types or hay replacements to get you and your horses through.

6. ANY food is better than NO food (for most horses).

Please feel welcome to share. ❤️🌾🐴

18/01/2026

Here's a little (read: long and angry) post about what I like to call the spring time shuffle.

Around this time of year, every year, two things happen.

1. We get complaints from a handful of (generally predictable) people whose horses have been trimmed just fine for the last several months suddenly saying their horse was "trimmed too short" this last visit.

And 2. We get a massive influx of enquiries from new clients who are looking for a new farrier because their last farrier "trimmed them too short".

Now, I can understand this logic if you're either new to horses, or this happens on the first visit with a new farrier without warning. However, all the rest of you, need your annual reality check. (I honestly think y'all also need a reality check on realistic "soundness" expectations but I'll save that for another grumpy day).

It is the annual shuffling of clients between all the local farriers' books, because the clients don't want to face the real reason why their horse is shuffling around the paddock.

No farrier wakes up EVERY NOVEMBER and just randomly starts trimming horses shorter than they did the WHOLE REST OF THE YEAR. Generally we have spent the entire preceding year telling you the one same message while you shout "LALALA" back at us with your fingers in your ears.

YOUR HORSE IS TOO FAT!

Post-trimming sensitivity is one of the most obvious warning signs that you will get for subclinical laminitis. When this warning is left unchecked, guess what follows? ACTUAL Laminitis.

We have become so disconnected as a society as to what healthy and appropriate body weight REALLY is. My masters degree research found that most horse owners could accurately identify their horses body condition score on a on a scare of 0-5 where 5 is obese. Some would even jokingly ask me if they could write 6. However when asked about the appropriateness of their horses body weight most of these high scorers felt their horses body weight was just fine.

I see the same thing day in day out as a hoof care practitioner. And the reactions from owners range from flat out denial ("Cobs are meant to look like this, they have big bones" ... Bones don't jiggle Karen!) to just outright offence as though I've personally insulted them or "their horse" or that I am an unkind person for "fat shaming". Your horses feelings aren't hurt. You just don't want to face the truth because it makes you uncomfortable.

It is very sad for our horses that being able to see their ribs from a certain angle has now become more offensive to people than seeing the myriad of health and wellbeing issues humans are creating by letting their horses suffer through chronic obesity and a constant state of low grade laminitis. We need to look back to what nature intended for animals (and ourselves). We have an abundance of carb-rich food in spring following the clear lack of food during winter. Wild / Feral horses would typically lose a lot of body condition during winters. They have minimal grass access and often rely on on fibrous and low-carb mosses, roots, leaves, bark, and their body fat reserves. When animals are consuming less carbohydrates they become more insulin sensitive. When you're insulin sensitive you don't need as much insulin in your system to regulate blood sugar. Then spring comes along and body weight is rapidly packed back on with rich grasses. And with constant and excessive consumption of carbs comes insulin resistance. Which means more and more and more insulin has to get produced to keep blood sugar under control.

In our domestic horses we're so afraid to let our horses slim down in the winter, and keep them in a chronic state of obesity and insulin resistance year round. Because we hard feed them all winter to maintain their "condition" spring hits and they never became insulin sensitive enough to deal with it.

We can also see this insulin resistance in some athletic horses who are fed high carbohydrate diets also - its the horse equivalent of the "skinny-fat" human. The human peak marathon runner who carb loads and gets diabetes and heart disease. Sadly, many of the horses we see with these problems are on "feeding plans" owners have developed themselves using a generic website (often funded by specific feed companies), from vets, or equine nutritionists (who often work for feed companies). You can see the owners well-meaning intent and that's why this breaks my heart. The nutritionists who I respect and recommend are the ones who are the first to tell you that you do not add to your horses diet unless they aren't meeting their metabolic requirements from grass and plain hay first. If I have one more client with a fat, laminitic horse tell me their horse isn't fat and that they paid someone for their feeding plan of processed feeds, I will lose my s**t. I am SO passionate about your horses health, that this makes me angry!

(And don't get me started on the inflammatory responses from most of these refined oils that get added cause for some reason people think shiny = healthy).

And most people (including many professionals) are either ignorant of, or overlook, the roll of insulin on hoof sensitivity. Yet the fact that high levels of insulin lead to inflammation is widely know and accepted. And what IS laminitis? INFLAMMATION OF THE LAMINAE.

Your farrier has nothing to financially gain by telling you stop feeding your dadgum horse! Yet we get ignored to the point we often stop commenting to people. And then people say "Why didn't you warn me!?"

Then we hit the tail end of spring, and bingo, another year, another bunch of shuffling underworked and over fed horses, and another year of farriers suddenly shuffling a bunch of desperate "my-last-farrier-trimmed-my-horse-too-short-I-need-your-help" new clients in and a bunch of grumpy "you-caused-this-problem" ones out.

It is no coincidence that all the species of animals that man controls the diet of are the ones that regularly suffer from metabolic malfunctions. We are so smart that we are incredibly fu***ng dumb sometimes.

I also have a LOT of clients who will ask at each trim if I see any signs of laminitis in the feet. The thing is I can tell you there are low grade warning signs all year but nothing *new* today, and your horse could still go lame tomorrow. The biggest warning signs I constantly see are your horses weight, your feed bucket, and how dry your saddle blanket always is if you bother to exercise your horse at all. But you don't listen to this. You only seem to listen (for a week or three) if I can physically point out blood in the white line.

So, here's my rant for the day. We are getting generally s**tty with overwork by the end of the year and in need of a christmas holiday, and we are disillusioned with all these "unexpected" lamenesses in valley full of improved dairy pasture in the middle of unprecedented spring growth.

It needed to come out.

Someone has to say it.

I don't give a s**t if I've hurt your feelings, because I want to save your horses life.

Address

Byford, WA
6122

Telephone

+61488581123

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