Northern BC Horse - all about horses and owners in northern BC Canada

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All about horses, equine sports and horse owners in northern British Columbia. Canada

July 27, 2010

Presenting the best of Northern BC Horse articles

Chewing Fences, Part 3

by Kristi Rensby

Other ideas to help relieve your horse's boredom are also available, though they tend to have pros and cons that you will have to weigh for your own individual situation.

If your horse is alone, consider getting him a companion - a pony, another horse, a cow or even a goat can help your horse from being so bored. However, be aware that your horse may not get along with the other animals and may chase them, putting them all at risk of injury. Also, a a smaller animal may be at risk from the amounts of food you feed your bigger horse, and also, you run the risk of a pony or other horse learning how to chew the fences too!

If your schedule allows for it, feed your horses more than twice a day. For example, instead of throwing them 2 flakes in the morning and 3 at night, feed one when you first get up, then another a few hours later, a "coffee break" if you will. Give them another flake at lunch, then dinner, then last thing before going to bed. Spreading out the feeding times takes a bit of effort on your part, but it can be done - even around a work schedule you can usually make three feedings instead of two.

You can try feeding lots of low quality grass hay to keep them busy chewing all day, but be careful not to feed mouldy or dusty hay. You just want to find hay with lower protein and food values. Also be aware that many horses will develop a "hay belly" - that pot-bellied, unthrifty look - from lower quality hay. These horses should be left on their regular diets, or try mixing some good hay with some lower quality hay, to prevent the big belly.

Spread out your feed! Instead of dumping two flakes per horse into the feeder, take it out into the field and shake it out. This works really well if you have hay with a bit of dust or chaff in it as the smaller particles drop to the ground. The horse is in much less danger of inhaling them, and if there is snow on the ground the horse can safely pick the particles up with the added moisture from the snow.

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Frame Overo

by Kristi Rensby

The frame overo is one that took me a bit of research as I was not familiar with it at all.

A frame overo seldom has white crossing the back line or under its belly, hence most of its white patches are contained along the neck, barrel and hip of the horse (though the white can and will cross over the top of the neck). This pattern earned its name by the placement of the white on the neck and body, creating a "framed" appearance of the horse's white patches, which tend to be crisp along the edges of the markings.

Frame overo tends to be responsible for the loudly marked overos - many of the horses we see in the top of the Paint horse world are frame overo. Some of the loudest overos are the combinations of frame and splash white or frame and sabino.

Many (but far from all) frame overos have one or both blue eyes (as compared to splash whites, which usually have blue eyes, or sabinos and tobianos which seldom have blue eyes). Facial white on a frame overo can be as minimal as a star (or even no marking at all), or it can be expressed with as much white as a bald or apron face, which is quite common in frame overos.

Unlike sabino and splash, frame overo does not put white markings on the horse's legs. Solid legs are one way to tell the horse is a frame overo rather than splash or sabino - however, when combined with one of the other overo genes, a frame may have white on the legs (again, combinations of overo genes can result in some pretty wildly marked horses!).

Frame overo has one negative linked with it. The gene that causes the frame pattern is also the gene responsible for the Lethal White Overo syndrome.

A Lethal White Overo is a foal that is born completely white, of two frame gened parents. The foal will die within a few days due to an incomplete intestinal tract, and many people put them down at birth. Nobody knows why this happens, but this gene is ONLY fatal in homozygous form, meaning if both parents pass the LWO gene on to the foal.

Fortunately, LWO can be tested for. All LWO carriers are heterozygous (carrying one copy of the LWO gene) or they themselves would have been a lethal white and died shortly after birth. Because both parents have to be carriers in order for the foal to inherit two copies of the gene, and because both parents can only be heterozygous, then the chance of a lethal white is only 25% per frame to frame breeding. However, 25% is a very high risk to take when it means a whole year of waiting is gone, and with it an innocent foal.

Most knowledgeable people will test horses that are possibly frame overo, and if one parent is positive for LWO, then they will test the horse they are breeding to as well. If LWO is found, you would probably not breed those two individuals together. LWO has also been identified in some horses that do not appear frame, including some solid horses, but it is believed that, similar to sabino, these horses are actually minimal frame overos.

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