Working with Windsuckers

Windsucking is one of those things people don't like to talk about. There are those who will tell you that windsuckers have to learn from other horses that windsuck. That certainly wasn't the case with Rupert. His was the first unmistakable 'burp' uttered on our Pakenham Upper property, he must have taught himself.

As I later learnt, he was a prime candidate to become a windsucker because as a weanling, he kept colicking. I'd bring the weanlings in to feed them, come back and find Rupert lying on the floor of his box. There must have been a dozen episodes before, our vet said 'try half a cup of Panacur cattle wormer, with a cup of water, and mix that in his feed for a few days’. The result was instant. No more colic, whether he was developing ulcers and something in the cattle drench provided a lining on his stomach, or it was a wormer resistance problem we don’t know. He never colicked with us again - but he did start wind sucking.

As wind -suckers go, he was a moderate. I did try putting a collar on him, but he looked so miserable I took it off again. He always held his condition, and it didn't stop him winning just on $150,000 on the track. Nowadays, he seems to confine his habit to feed times. One mouthful of feed, one suck on the feeder post.

Paul McGreevy is internationally recognized as an expert in equine behaviour. A qualified vet, he spent five years in general practice in England and Australia, before becoming a Veterinary Research Fellow at Bristol University where he completed his doctoral thesis on animal behaviour. Paul is currently a Senior Lecturer in Animal Behaviour at the University of Sydney's Veterinary Faculty.

I rang him to find out more about wind-sucking...

“If we were a bit more informed about the way we wean, and subsequently nourish Thoroughbred foals, we would have fewer of these chronic problems to deal with in adult horses. In just the same way, if we were a bit more sophisticated in our breaking techniques of our youngsters, we would probably find them easier to plug in to leisure riding jobs after their racing careers.”

“The social effects of weaning on oral stereotypes are less than the effect of what they are fed when they are weaned. The social context of weaning has a bearing on weaving but not on oral stereotypic behaviour.”

So what causes them to become wind-suckers?

“wind-sucking and crib-biting have now been related to the concentrated diets that are presented to youngsters, most importantly at the time of weaning.”

Is that ulcer related?

“There is evidence that there is a link between the emergence of crib-biting and ulceration - of course, ulceration is also related to concentrated diets.”

How much of a problem is wind sucking going to be in transforming our racehorse to a riding horse?

“It is not going to affect the horses behaviour under saddle. There are very few horses who try to grab a hold of fences while they are being ridden, although there are some. There are some horses that windsuck and crib-bite a lot after the bridle comes off, so you might notice it more as you are taking the gear off the horse, more than when you are putting it on. There is concern in the veterinary community that these horses are predisposed to flatulent colic, and of course if they are very committed wind-suckers they will carry on doing it so heartily that they will replace feeding and resting in their time budget.”

“I think we should do all we can to reduce the frequency of wind-sucking, and there is one promising paper that has suggested that antacids in the diet may help even an adult, established wind-sucker or crib-biter.”

How do owners get access to these antacids - from the vet?

“There is one paper that describes the use of a very old potion, including chalk and willow bark, the researcher who did this work subsequently used Rennies - human antacid tablets - but it would cost you a fortune to do that. His response when I asked him that same question, was, anything that reduces the acidity of the diet.”

Are collars a good idea?

“Collars are certainly losing favour now because the evidence is that the horse actually does more crib biting when the collars are off, and that horses increase their motivation to crib bite when the collars are on. That means that they often have to have the collars tighter and tighter, and it is not uncommon to find evidence of skin trauma because of tight collars.”

So what should the owner of a wind-sucker do?

“Increase the amount of forage that the horse gets, give it far more fibre than concentrate, when you give it fibre make sure it has to work fairly hard to get it, so maybe put one hay net inside the other, so the horse has to work harder, and therefore longer, to consume its forage ration. Also consider including chaff in the concentrated ration. When the recipes for antacid supplements become available, I will be the first to tell you.”

Is the wind-sucker going to teach every other horse on the property to wind-suck?

“I have just been reviewing a paper on this. It is the fifth attempt that researchers have made to show that horses can learn a novel behaviour from another horse, and yet again, this group has failed to show that they do. Because there is no evidence that horses can learn new behaviours from each other without their own trials and errors, a more straight forward explanation for what we see as evidence of copying in the field is that the management of the second horse is as flawed as the management of the first horse, and that is why we get the illusion of copying. We prefer to think that the horses have taught each other rather than looking at our own house, to see whether or not it is in order. All the old horse boys say 'horses learn it from each other', but they usually haven't considered that their management was at fault with both horses.”

And is heritability a factor in wind sucking ?

“Well, there is an Italian study which shows that the certain family groups of Thoroughbreds are more likely to have the disorder than others. One caveat with that paper though is that a certain line of Thoroughbred may be favoured by a certain trainer and so the management of horses from that line can be similar. Fundamentally, we have to be careful about these sorts of confounding factors, when assessing the importance of heritability.”