Benefits of Using Apple Cider Vinegar For Horses
Using apple cider vinegar for horses can help with many ailments and support overall well-being.
Apples grow abundantly in the UK. Sadly, many go to waste because people can’t be bothered to pick them. Apples and their concentrates provide valuable minerals and acids which are essential to health.
Apple cider vinegar contains all the medicinal virtues of apples. Given regularly to your horse, it has the following benefits:
- Cleanses the digestive tract and balances the acid/alkaline ratio. Correct stomach acidity is the basis of good gut health and worm resistance
- Maintains the correct water balance in the tissues preventing oedema and dehydration.
- Joint and muscle pain reduced
- Helps to dissolve calcium deposits in kidneys and bladder, and around joints.
- Oxygenates tissues
- Used topically reduces swelling and disinfects skin wounds.
- Can relieve mild itching.
- Fly repellent qualities through increasing thiamine excretion
What Is The Best Apple Cider Vinegar For Horses?
Apple Cider Vinegar should be unpasteurised.
Whilst this might seem counter-intuitive, this means that all of the good bacteria, necessary for good gut health, have not been killed off through the pasteurisation process.
Ideally, it should also be made from whole apples, rather than from pulp from other food production processes using apples, or from concentrate
We do not believe that the apples need to be organic to produce very high-quality apples cider vinegar for horses.
How Much Should I Feed?
As with all supplements, any change should be introduced gradually.
Hilton Herbs recommend a daily intake of 30-50ml for horses, and 15-30ml for ponies.
What Is In Apple Cider Vinegar?
Apples contain all the great builders of the various tissues in the body:
- Calcium – builder of bone, cardiac stimulant
- Iron – oxygen carrier, builds red blood cells
- Potassium – brain and nerve cells. Maintains water balance in tissues, removing excess.
- Magnesium – a muscle builder, enhances calcium uptake.
- Sodium – ensures water is retained in the tissues, preventing dehydration.
- Traces of silica, copper, sulphur, phosphorous and fluorine.
- All apples contain malic and gallic acids. Gallic acid is astringent and cleansing to the mucous membranes of the digestive tract acting as an antiseptic tonic.
- Malic acid carries its own life-giving oxygen about one-third of its atoms are made up of oxygen. This oxygen is readily absorbed in the tissues.
- Pectin found in apples and other fruit of the Rosaceae family such as Hawthorn, Quince, Pear and Rose reduces cholesterol deposits in the arteries and assists in healthy bowel elimination.
Further Information:
The most informative book on the uses and benefits of Apple Cider Vinegar, Folk Medicine, was written by Dr. D C Jarvis in 1958. A medical doctor in Vermont who noted the improved health of humans and animals while taking apple cider vinegar.
Margaret Hills, a nurse, published her book in 1961, giving advice on using cider vinegar and honey for various conditions, especially arthritis.
A true story was reported by The Telegraph newspaper in 2007, about a British woman who bought the book and followed the cider vinegar advice, resulting in a cure of painful arthritis. Click this link to read: ‘The Acid Test for Arthritis’
In Normandy (France), where unsweetened cider is drunk, the occurrence of kidney and bladder stones is rare.
These old sayings have an element of sound truth; apples are a veritable storehouse of valuable minerals, acids and enzymes.
- “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”
- “To eat an apple on going to bed will make the doctor beg his bread”
