How To Prevent Dehydration in Your Horse

With exercise the body temperature rises. This heat must be dissipated or the horse will literally cook! The body cools itself through the evaporation of sweat so sweating is especially important for the exercising horse. The sweat contains water and electrolytes or salts. The main electrolytes are sodium chloride potassium calcium and magnesium. When the body loses water and electrolytes various functions are compromised and the health of the horse can be at risk. To ensure that your horse remains healthy learn to effectively replace both the water and electrolytes and the electrolytes must be replaced in balance with what has been lost. 

Note While this article focuses on exercising horses it is important to realize that heat stress from confinement in a horse trailer for hours can result in profuse sweat losses due to hyperthermia abnormally high body temperature and anxiety. 
Replacing the Losses 
For sedentary horses or horses undergoing lowlevel or shortterm work salt losses through sweat can generally be readily replenished by a good quality diet and provision of loose salt in a bucket or added to the feed if necessary. However horses in training and therefore sweating several days a week and regularly involved in intense or prolonged activity during competition may become chronically deficient in electrolytes because there may not be enough in the feed to replace those losses. Horses involved in longterm higherintensity work may lose electrolytes at a rapid rate 10 to 15 litres of sweat per hour and the sudden decrease in electrolytes can cause muscle problems and heat stress injuries.
How Do You Help Your Horse? 
When you help your horse by minimizing water and electrolyte losses or quickly replace the losses you will be helping your horse maintain optimal health and optimal performance. Remember that you can always slow down. Fast speed is the main way to lose lots of water and electrolytes and risk heat stress in your horse. Learning to effectively cool out your horse at rest stops is also paramount to prevent heat stress and lower sweat losses.  
Before you start through all the electrolyte information though make sure that you have your horse on a proper optimal diet. Then make sure that you have trained your horse to the level needed for the event and the terrain. Training must incorporate a strategy for electrolyte supplementation before possibly during and after exercise or transport. You cannot make up