23/05/2025
WHAT YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT HORSES
By Kevin Holten
How much do you know about horses? I ask that because I thought I knew a lot, but you’re never too old to learn.
Now, you must understand that I tell people that my best friend is a horse. His name is “Big Boy”, he’s a big sorrel gelding that is very adept at both rounding up cattle in the Badlands and as a team roping, all-purpose horse.
We’ve been together for a long time. And I bought him years ago from some people in Huron, South Dakota who’d kind of tossed him aside, threw him out to pasture and called him “Ug” for ugly.
Oh sure, he’s got a Roman nose and might not be pretty enough to be on the front cover of a national horse magazine any time soon. But he looks good to me, never quits, enjoys what he does, and I bought him without ever getting on him when I looked into his eyes as soon as they unloaded him from the stock trailer.
Once I did ride him, he was everything I could ever have hoped for. And we fit together like a calloused hand in a tailored glove. Fact is, I hug him, and he hugs me back and it’ll be a sad day whenever he and I have to part.
Which leads me to a discussion I had with Jim Chiapetta, President & CEO of Achieve Equine from Delano, MN on Tuesday of this week.
We put Jim in front of our cameras to do an interview for an episode of our television series, WILD RIDES: From the Heart of America. Achieve Equine is a worldwide distributor of innovative, evidence-based equine products. And are most famous as the maker of FLAIR Strips.
Now, you might be familiar with the strips that athletes stick across their nose to improve their breathing and oxygen flow during rigorous competition. Well guess what, the same thing is available to for use by high performance horses to improve their oxygen intake during competition.
And why is that important? Well actually it’s more important for horses than it is for humans because horses, whether you know this or not, cannot breathe through their mouth. Their only intake valves are their nostrils. So, opening those values even more so is a nice advantage.
But it’s important for another reason too. For example, there is something called Exercise-Induced Pulmonary Hemorrhage (EIPH), which is bleeding in the lungs of horses during or after strenuous exercise.
EIPH occurs when tiny blood vessels in the lungs rupture, causing blood to seep into the airways and lungs. It's common for racehorses and other performance horses but can also occur in horses of any breed or type if they are undergoing strenuous exercise.
Now, what is considered strenuous exercise for a horse is much different than what it is for you and me. For example, years ago I could lope Big Boy five miles, chase 150 head of cattle from one pasture to the next, and then lope him five miles back home again and he wouldn’t give it a second thought. But today, Big Boy rides in a trailer for those five miles back and forth before and after moving cattle.
Yet what I learned on Tuesday is that research shows that those FLAIR strips can prevent EIPH in horses. Proving once again that, in life, it’s the little things.
PHOTO: ANNIKA PLUMMER
SOURCE: WILD RIDES INTERVIEW/EPISODE
