Page 12 - July 2008 The Game

12 The Game, July 2008
Back in my days of
working in the feed
business in Ontario, I
collaborated with my
company’s Ph.D. nutrition-
ist in formulating a new
premium line of horse feeds. He was an interest- ing soul, more versed in ruminant nutrition than equine when I met him, but utterly intrigued
Canada’s Thoroughbred Racing Newspaper
The Rearing of a Race Fan
By Peter Valing
by horses and what they could, and could not,
be compelled to eat. He decided my little herd of off-the-track Thoroughbreds would be ideal guinea pigs, and would regularly send me home with little Tupperware containers of avoured powders to try. “See if they like the blackcurrant or the mandarin orange better,” he’d say with a grin.
a different avouring. In the initial trial, all 15 avours were tested on each horse. On trial days, six paired, avoured feeds were offered daily with a minimum of one hour between meals. Each avour was given at the same concentra- tion (1%, or 1g of avouring per 100 g of feed), except for echinacea, which was fed at a 10% concentration according to its manufacturer’s recommendations. Goodwin’s team recorded
The grooming of my daughter into a Thoroughbred fan began in earnest with the purchase of her rst horse. This transaction came quite by chance, but at an opportune moment as Francesca was about to take her rst steps. One Saturday on my walk to the track, a horse caught my eye that looked just about perfect for a little girl. It was tan with a axen mane and tail and stood at a height from which a fall would engender little more than a bump. I took a closer look at the horse on my way home and nearly bought it there and then from the day’s winnings.
While our results were based on too small
a sampling to be statistically signi cant, they
did at least hint that there might be more to increasing the palatability of equine feeds
and medications than just globbing on the molasses. But a 2005 study by Deborah Goodwin, a psychologist in animal behav-
iour at the University of Southampton (UK),
and colleagues at the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition, goes much further. Goodwin’s equine taste test revealed that horsey taste buds can be surprisingly adventurous. Who knew that fenugreek and banana would outrank carrot, and that apple wouldn’t even make the Top Ten?
the quantity of each avoured feed consumed, as well as the time it took the horse to compete the consumption, partial rejection, or refusal of the offering. The feed was deemed ‘refused’ if the horse failed to even taste it, and partially rejected if he/she began to eat it and then showed no further interest in it for a period of two minutes or longer.
But I had never purchased a horse, and what would my wife think? Upon closer examination, the animal did look a little frayed. I continued walking past, thinking that I had better consult my wife before bringing the horse home.
“Flavour (has) signi cant effects on diet acceptance, selection, and consumption times,” Goodwin notes. It has been suggested in pre- vious studies (cited in her paper published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science) that horses experience dietary monotony thanks to the unwavering content of the grain portion of their diets, even though their gut micro ora probably thank them for not having to cope with sudden dietary changes. And it’s been argued that in nature, horses have the opportunity to pick and choose the avours they prefer by selectively grazing.
both less well accepted than spicy turmeric or resinous rosemary.) The eight avours with the fastest mean consumption times – banana, carrot, cherry, cumin, fenugreek, oregano, peppermint, and rosemary – were then presented in paired preference tests. Based on how much of each was consumed, and how often the horses showed an exclusive preference (scar ng down all of one avouring, and completely ignoring the other), they came up with the following ranking, from yummiest to least yummy: fenugreek, banana, cherry, rosemary, cumin, carrot, peppermint, and oregano.
The bell above the door chimed, but otherwise the shop was quiet. Quiet and full of junk - so full that we had to shimmy along the aisle to reach the window display. We stretched our necks over a dilapidated hutch in order to examine the horse further. “I don’t think so,” said my wife. “Look at how dirty and matted the mane is, and the rear
In a domestic situation, avour enhancement might help alleviate some of the monotony with- out making a dramatic change to the composition of the ration. In lambs and calves, some dietary choice of avours results in more optimal growth rates even when the rations were otherwise identical. And, of course, there’s the perennial issue of horses who are picky eaters or refuse to eat or drink away from home. Knowing more about which avours tempt their appetites might help keep them consuming, which is a factor in performance.
Fenugreek, you say? What the heck IS fenugreek? According to my comprehensive, 685-page “Visual Food Encyclopedia”, it’s a seasoning, hailing from southwestern Europe and India. Fenugreek seeds have a bittersweet avour and, when roasted, a distinctive aftertaste of caramel or maple syrup. In fact, the food industry uses fenugreek in the preparation of arti cial maple avouring, which might explain its appeal to horses. And further research reveals the fenugreek plant comes from the same family as peas and clover, making it a legume. Mystery solved – most horses have never met a legume they didn’t like.
is covered in crayon.” “Croup,” I was about to say, but checked myself. Instead, I pointed out the positive features beyond the dust and grime. The horse had wooden rails, glass eyes and a velvety coat and came with a leather saddle and metal stirrups. One couldn’t buy a rocking horse like this in a toy shop nowadays. Everything was plastic. I left her to ponder this endorsement and disappeared into the darkness of the shop to nd its proprietor.
The avours currently used in commercial horse rations are pretty limited, Goodwin notes. She began by identifying 15 taste sensations which are either in current use, or were fed to horses historically: apple, banana, cherry, carrot, coriander (one of Goodwin’s previous studies
on olfactory attractants and repellents for horses indicated they particularly like the smell of coriander, aka cilantro), cumin, echinacea, fenugreek, garlic, ginger, nutmeg, oregano, pep- permint, rosemary, and turmeric. Of these, only the garlic, peppermint, carrot, and apple were familiar to the eight horses used in the study. The rest, their taste buds had not encountered in the previous year, possibly never.
Don’t ask me to explain the appeal of bananas.
In a side room full of threadbare Persian rugs, the proprietor found me. “Do you know how to tie a tie?” asked the little man with shiny eyes. When I nodded, he handed me a thin, greasy tie. While I knotted it, he told me of his family’s journey from Afghanistan. “You’re from Central Asia,” I exclaimed, “The birthplace of the horse!” He smiled and withdrew from a grocery bag another tie for me to knot. He was attending a wedding that evening and needed several tie options to match the various suits his wife would pick out for him at home. Upon knotting the fth tie, I inquired about the horse in his display window. “You like?” he said. I nodded. “I charge $25, but since
you help me with tie, I give to you for $20.” Together the shopkeeper and I snaked our way to the opposite end of
the store. It took some effort to remove the horse from the cluttered display and more effort to convince my wife of its ultimate worth. She only relented when I promised not to bring it into our apartment until it was scrubbed clean.
The structure of the study was fairly simple:
The conclusion? Horses accept a far wider range of avours than is currently available commercially, and we should perhaps broaden our perceptions of their preferences when we’re formulating feeds or trying to mask an unpleas- ant-tasting medication. Bring on the banana!
Continued Page 14 - See Fleabag
THE EQUINE TASTE TEST
Equine Health
By Karen Briggs
Dave Landry Photo
each morning, the horses were offered two tubs,
each containing 200 g of a “standard, un avoured concentrate ration” of cereal byproducts, doctored with
I was not raised in a horse racing family with the near- tragic result that the sport could have passed me by had I not happened on Hastings one fortuitous afternoon. Driven by the naïve (albeit noble) ambition to raise your children better than you were raised yourself, I decided shortly upon the birth of our rst child to correct what I perceived to
be a de ciency in the family blood. Unlike her forbearers, Francesca Josephine Valing would grow up knowing horses.
Goodwin followed that trial up with a second one designed to rank the horses’ favourites. In the rst trial, 12 of the 15 avours were uni- versally accepted. Four of the eight horses said phooey to echinacea, nutmeg was rejected by three, and coriander by one individual. (Least popular after that were ginger and garlic,
The next weekend, I took my family to the track. I indicated the horse to them on the way. My wife didn’t seem thrilled. I, however, remained optimistic. There was something about this horse that I liked. We parked right in front of it on the way home. “Looks kind of run down,” said my wife. “Maybe all it needs is some grooming,” I replied. I pulled my sleepy daughter out of her car seat so that she too could take a look. Child and horse stared at each other without moving.
In a nal trial, Goodwin’s team found that adding fenugreek or banana avouring to a relatively unpalatable mineral pellet, signi cantly reduced the time it took for the horses to eat the pellets. There was no signi cant difference be- tween the two avourings study-wide, but horses did exhibit individual preferences for one or the other.
All afternoon I worked it over on the balcony with
brush and water until all the knots were out of its tail and the crayon out of its coat. My daughter watched me with wonder through the sliding door. By nightfall the horse was reasonably clean, and two days later it was dry and ready to ride.
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