26/10/2022
PLEASE BEWARE, another reminder of the dangers at this time of year.
ATYPICAL MIOPATHY KILLS!
With less grass available at pasture, horses may be more likely to eat other plants during the autumn months.
Care should be taken to avoid grazing around SYCAMORE and OAK trees, as both sycamore seedlings and acorns are toxic to horses and can be fatal if enough are consumed. If you cannot avoid these trees entirely, you can try sectioning off the area or providing hay in the field well away from the trees. Signs of toxicity include bloody diarrhoea, red-brown urine, severe colic, weakness, tremors and collapse.
These symptoms are a medical emergency, and the vet must be called immediately.
You may have noticed a lot of tree seeds around at the moment – it's a bumper year for acorns, beech nuts, hawthorn berries, chestnuts, hazelnuts and other tree seeds.
Trees don’t produce seeds every year. When they do, it’s called a mast year and the idea is that they will produce lots, all at the same time and they coordinate it so that all of the trees in the same area will seed simultaneously.
This year is a mast year, but it’s an unusually big one, and this is probably down to the summer we just had. Record high temperatures and low rainfall has put trees under stress, which has encouraged them to generate seeds as a way of making sure their genes survive.
