The Horse's Advocate Podcast

Glucose is an essential sugar for horses, but too much of it can be harmful. While diet is your main tool for reducing glucose intake, what can you do when your horse still struggles with glucose and insulin control? And are there medications that can help lower blood glucose? Let's explore one option together.
If dietary changes are not enough, other strategies can help manage high glucose and insulin. For instance, veterinarians are now turning to a human drug called ertugliflozin (er-TUG-li-flo-zen) to lower blood glucose with promising results. In this discussion, you'll discover how this drug and others in its class work, what the treatment plan entails, and possible side effects to monitor. I'll also explore the cost of treatment and discuss current research on its use in horses.

Glucose is one of many sugars. It is an essential nutrient for both horses and people. When talking about sugar in food, you might hear words like carbs, starch, fructose, lactose, saccharide, or others. But for now, let's just focus on glucose. Without it, our horses—and we—cannot survive.
Yet glucose damages everything it touches inside the body! It is so harmful that the phrase "glucose disposal" is often used to describe how the body protects itself from glucose. Insulin helps the body remove glucose. Without insulin, glucose levels rise in the bloodstream, harming whatever they come into contact with. To control blood glucose levels, cells respond to insulin. When a cell takes in as much glucose as it can, it stops responding to insulin. This is normal and needed for the complex process to work.
If insulin resistance happens every day, why is it a problem when your horse has it? That's what this podcast is about. I'll explain how the body uses glucose, how it protects itself, and when insulin resistance becomes a real issue.

New horse owners join the community every day, from children to adults with little or no experience. Many expect horse ownership to be as simple as using everyday conveniences like microwaves or making phone calls.
Yet, horses are fundamentally different. Unlike technology, which responds reliably to our commands, horses have evolved to interpret and respond to their environment using all their senses. This makes horse ownership far more complex than people often assume. To address this complexity, many new owners seek additional education or guidance to better understand their horses. But if the teaching material comes from other inexperienced people, the instructions the new owners find are either too complex, with a "to-do list" too long to remember, or are based on specialized equipment they have to purchase.
The solution lies in learning how we are perceived by the horse and how we can change ourselves to help the horse understand us. To do this, horse owners need to find a mentor, observe how the horse responds to them, and then work on changing themselves so the horse perceives them positively. Stand in front of a mirror to find the solution in yourself, rather than looking at the horse to change.

Horses graze on grass and plants, not trees, because their digestive tracts—shared by equids, tapirs, and rhinoceroses—cannot digest wood. Unlike ruminants (cattle, deer, goats), they avoid lignin. When starving, however, horses may eat almost anything, which is why some plants and trees become toxic.
The goal of this podcast is not to make you plant and tree experts, but to help you appreciate two key principles of horse care: always provide adequate protein and forage, and proactively remove any potentially harmful vegetation before curious horses can reach it. Your horse's health depends on your attention to these crucial details.
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#horses #veterinary #horseteeth #horsecare #equinedentistry
Join us at The Horses Advocate Community page: https://community.thehorsesadvocate.com/yt
Dentistry: https://theequinepractice.com/
Horsemanship Dentistry School: https://www.horsemanshipdentistryschool.com/c/information/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheHorsesAdvocate
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/horsesadvocate/
Geoff Tucker is a veterinarian and horseman who has worked with horses since 1973. He earned his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Cornell University in 1984. Over the years, Geoff went from mucking stalls as a farmhand to starting his own equine practice. This journey helped him learn how to blend medical care with good horsemanship.
Geoff believes in doing what is best for the horse and also in working with the horse. While at Cornell, he started the Cornell Student Horseman's Association, which organized talks with local experts, a knowledge competition called the Intercollegiate Horse Bowl, and Foal Watch at the Equine Research Park to help with live foal deliveries. Wanting to educate horse owners even more, Geoff also launched the first "I Love New York Horse Symposium," which drew 500 people from across the northeast.
Geoff also spent time working at the Equine Isolation Lab with respected colleagues, including Dr. Coggins, whose name is on the well-known test. He worked both part-time and full-time at Cornell's Equine Research Park.
On graduation day in 1984, while his classmates celebrated, Geoff drove his fully stocked vet truck to his first call—a sick foal. This marked the beginning of The Finger Lakes Equine Practice, which still operates today. Geoff sold the practice in 1996, worked for a short time at another clinic near Albany, NY, and then started The Equine Practice, focusing on equine dentistry. He continues this work from his base in South Florida.
Geoff worked on his first horse's teeth in 1983, when his mentor showed him how to place his hand inside a horse's mouth without medication and rasp off the offending sharp points. He was hooked from the start and made dentistry a key part of his practice. Since then, he has examined the mouths of over 84,000 horses across the United States - yes, he's been counting.

Science relies on asking questions, testing them, obtaining answers, and questioning those answers again. Scientists never settle; their curiosity drives them to consider all possibilities, regardless of prior beliefs. There is never a final answer—only answers that are close. This approach depends on continuous inquiry and skepticism.
Horse owners are not scientists, and they are not trained to perform "research." Instead, they, and in fact the scientists themselves, are people who have evolved to work towards "social acceptance" as a means to survive harsh conditions that existed for millions of years. Believing other people who appeared to know things you didn't know is a natural phenomenon - people don't want to "rock the boat." The result is the formation of a social identity that gives us stability within a group. Examples include people in horse sports such as reining, dressage, eventing, or racing. Other examples are in differing opinions about treatments or care.
This podcast discusses how scientific studies have rules to prevent bias, steering researchers towards a more accurate answer to their question (hypothesis). Unfortunately, untrained people are unable to see when scientific rules are broken, making the results of studies, especially nutritional studies about horses, unreliable when reported by the press. Worse is when those magazines are funded by advertisements that support the outcomes they promote. Hopefully, through this podcast, horse owners will become aware and keep asking questions until the foundational truths about our horses' health are discovered.
*******************************
#horses #veterinary #horseteeth #horsecare #equinedentistry
Join us at The Horses Advocate Community page: https://community.thehorsesadvocate.com/yt
Dentistry: https://theequinepractice.com/
Horsemanship Dentistry School: https://www.horsemanshipdentistryschool.com/c/information/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheHorsesAdvocate
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/horsesadvocate/
Geoff Tucker is a veterinarian and horseman who has worked with horses since 1973. He earned his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Cornell University in 1984. Over the years, Geoff went from mucking stalls as a farmhand to starting his own equine practice. This journey helped him learn how to blend medical care with good horsemanship.
Geoff believes in doing what is best for the horse and also in working with the horse. While at Cornell, he started the Cornell Student Horseman's Association, which organized talks with local experts, a knowledge competition called the Intercollegiate Horse Bowl, and Foal Watch at the Equine Research Park to help with live foal deliveries. Wanting to educate horse owners even more, Geoff also launched the first "I Love New York Horse Symposium," which drew 500 people from across the northeast.
Geoff also spent time working at the Equine Isolation Lab with respected colleagues, including Dr. Coggins, whose name is on the well-known test. He worked both part-time and full-time at Cornell's Equine Research Park.
On graduation day in 1984, while his classmates celebrated, Geoff drove his fully stocked vet truck to his first call—a sick foal. This marked the beginning of The Finger Lakes Equine Practice, which still operates today. Geoff sold the practice in 1996, worked for a short time at another clinic near Albany, NY, and then started The Equine Practice, focusing on equine dentistry. He continues this work from his base in South Florida.
Geoff worked on his first horse's teeth in 1983, when his mentor showed him how to place his hand inside a horse's mouth without medication and rasp off the offending sharp points. He was hooked from the start and made dentistry a key part of his practice. Since then, he has examined the mouths of over 84,000 horses across the United States - yes, he's been counting.