11/04/2026
Yep
🐎⚙ A couple of products that really grind my gears ⚙🐎
Following on from my posts about big brands, marketing and the price of supplements, I thought I'd share a couple of my personal pet peeves. Anyone who knows me knows I love a good rant, so hopefully this one doesn't disappoint!
Pet peeve #1 🫣🔫
An EXTREMELY popular gut supplement with oodles of anecdotal reports from owners who think it's the duck's nuts.
Now, I actually have very little issue with the product itself. I don't think it's the duck's nuts, but it's not harmful and may indeed really help some horses.
My issue with it is that you need to sell your firstborn child to afford to feed it to just one horse on an ongoing basis! And when I look at the ingredients, I struggle to find anything that justifies its price. There's nothing particularly revolutionary in there, nothing that makes me think, well, THAT explains why it costs so much. So why is it SO expensive?
My suspicion is that a considerable part of what people are paying for is the marketing. And by God, has it been marketed well.
Am I jealous that I don't have the same marketing budget? Abso-effing-lutely I am.
BUT I'm also cranky that people are paying through the nose for something when there are products containing similar ingredients available for considerably less money.
And before someone tells me how wonderfully it worked for their horse, I'm not saying it didn't! I'm saying that a product can be helpful without necessarily being worth what you're paying for it.
Those are two entirely different things.
Pet peeve #2 😬🔫
An EXTREMELY popular calming supplement that contains a relatively small amount of the very ingredient that's supposedly responsible for calming the horse down.
And again, INSANELY priced, like off the freaking charts exxy.
This one particularly irritates me because, in my opinion and experience, marketing is doing pretty much all the heavy lifting.
At the recommended daily feeding rate, this particular product provides just a little over 1 g of the very mineral it's marketed for. For some perspective, a 500 kg horse requires approximately 7.5 g of this mineral per day for maintenance, much of which will ordinarily be supplied by its forage and other feed.
Now, the amount alone doesn't tell us whether a supplement will work, particularly when different forms of a mineral may have different bioavailability. But here's where I have an issue.
The actual scientific evidence that supplementing this magical mineral will reliably calm your horses is hugely underwhelming. Yes, it's essential for normal nerve and muscle function, but that doesn't mean adding more to an already adequate diet is going to make your horse calmer.
Now, before I get knotted knickers thrown my way, I'm not suggesting that nobody has ever noticed an improvement after using a calming supplement. But an improvement doesn't necessarily prove that the supplement caused it. (Did someone say 'placebo'??)
And before we start throwing expensive powders at anxious, spooky or reactive horses, perhaps we should be looking at their diets, management, environment, training and whether there's an underlying physical reason for the behaviour.
Because I can assure you, a ridiculously expensive scoop of powder isn't going to fix poor management or an underlying physical problem, no matter how much you manifest the bejesus out of it.
And yet people will spend hundreds of dollars trying to change a horse's behaviour without necessarily investigating WHY the horse is behaving that way in the first place. The same could be said for ulcers, we need to treat the cause, peeps, not just the symptom!
Now, of course, I understand why people buy these products. We all want to do the best for our horses, and when something promises to help with a problem we've been struggling with, it's tempting. I am not saying I haven't tried magic powders for my own horses' issues. In desperation, we'll try just about anything. But if I think back to how many times these things worked, I'm left scratching my head.
I'm not against businesses making money. I am a business and sadly, my horses don't pay for themselves. I'm not against marketing. (I was going to say that THIS is marketing, but I think it's actually venting 😂😂) And I'm certainly not suggesting that every supplement is a waste of money, that would be crazy given I sell supplements.
What I STRONGLY object to is the idea that clever marketing, a premium price tag and a tonne of testimonials should somehow be accepted as proof of efficacy or value.
It. Just. Isn't.
**And one final thing before anyone starts playing detective...**
I won't be naming either product in the comments, responding to private messages asking me to identify them, nor will I confirm or deny anyone's guesses.
I'm not on a witch hunt, and I'm not interested in starting a pile-on against particular companies. That's not the point of this post.
What I AM interested in is getting people to ask better questions, look a little more closely at what they're feeding and become more curious about the products they're spending their hard-earned money on.
If this post makes you turn over a supplement container, read the ingredients, do a few calculations or question whether something is actually worth what you're paying for it, then it's done exactly what I wanted it to do.
A little more curiosity and a little less blind faith in marketing wouldn't go astray.
