The Horse's Advocate Podcast

Foals are especially vulnerable in their first months of life. Think about the first time you met a newborn foal—did you know it takes both knowledge and experience to protect them well? In this podcast, we'll dive into three of the top challenges horse owners face with foals just after birth to a few months old. This isn't a complete list, so remember, teaming up with a seasoned professional will always help you stay ahead of problems. I picked these three foal problems because they're common—and, good news, they're all preventable!
Imagine welcoming a new foal into the world. Suddenly, you learn that one of the biggest risks it faces is failure of passive transfer (FPT). This can happen if the foal does not drink the mare's first milk within 24 hours of birth. Or, it may occur if the mare's milk leaks out before birth. The resulting weak immune system leaves your foal vulnerable to everyday germs. Illness and even death can follow.
Have you ever noticed a foal with diarrhea? It's a common issue, with several possible causes. Diet is usually to blame, but sometimes more serious issues are at play.
Have you ever noticed a foal struggling to walk, or perhaps heard about issues like contracted tendons, angular limb deformities, or epiphysitis? In addition to infection and digestive concerns, these developmental orthopedic diseases (DOD) are conditions I often see when I'm called to work on the mare's teeth. The good news is that these issues are almost always diet-related and preventable.
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#horses #veterinary #horseteeth #horsecare #equinedentistry
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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 worked at the Equine Isolation Lab alongside 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.

Filing off sharp edges inside a horse's mouth may seem a bit odd at first glance. If nature is perfect, you might wonder, why would horse teeth need this help? How did horses get by without floating, the process that smooths those sharp edges? These are thoughtful questions, and I explore them—and more—in this podcast.
Some of the ideas I present are:
- It is the threshold of pain, not how sharp the edges are, that determines how often to float.
-Not all tooth enamel is the same among horses.
-If a horse is chewing, their teeth need doing.
-Using a bit moves the soft tissue into the sharp edges.
-Waiting until a problem occurs often results in more aggressive treatments and a poorer outcome.

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.