Horses
- Should Science Prevail?
I recently attended the Minnesota Nutrition Conference where Purina was asked to participate in a round table discussion on prebiotic and probiotic use in feeds. We were asked to write an abstract for the scientific proceedings as follows: As a panel...
- Behind The Scenes....looking Intense
In this blog, you get to see a lot of good research going on and learn about our travels across the country. But behind all this fun is the hard work that takes place in front of a computer, in meetings and through group efforts that plan...
- Are Extruded Feeds Easier For A Horse To Digest?
If you have ever fed a commercial dog food product, you know what an extruded feed looks like. Extrusion is simply the process of pushing a mix of heated feed ingredients through small holes under high pressure. You don’t see many extruded horse feeds...
- No Break In R&d For The New Year!
We are trying to get readjusted after the completion of our exercise physiology test in December. After our last data collection day we moved all of the exercise horses out to pasture for a well deserved break. Our broodmares and open mares have all...
- Running For The Roses At The Purina Research Farm This Week!
One of our favorite things to do at the research farm is conduct exercise physiology studies. We have a phenomenal set up with a high speed treadmill and Equi-ciser that we use regularly for experiments, training, weight maintenance and other research...
Horses
My Research Reality....for today
What is neat about this blog is that all of our followers can see first hand all the great research we are working on at Purina. But my day today didn't really involve exciting hands on work. It instead involved reading literature about digestibility of feedstuffs in horses. This picture on the left shows a small portion of some of the heavy reading I did. Digestibility in horses can be a tricky thing. We have done some very extensive and detailed trials at Purina measuring exactly what is going in and what is going out of our research horses on a daily basis. We collect manure and urine in special collection harnesses and we measure feed intake to a 10th of a pound. But when those animal studies are over, we move onto the analysis phase where we organize and interpret all the data, run statistics on the numbers to look for differences and overall, see if our results match our research hypothesis. Right now, we are analyzing data from a very large digestibility trial that had multiple collection phases and has taken almost 2 years to complete. We will spend the next few months analyzing the thousands of data points we collected. It may not be exciting to many people, but I really enjoy this part of the process. I like analyzing the numbers and really seeing if something works. How did the test product really perform? Are the differences between treatment and control diets significant? What does it mean physiologically to the horse? These are all questions we work to answer everyday. And although it involves just working in front of my computer and reading all day, its fun nonetheless.
- Should Science Prevail?
I recently attended the Minnesota Nutrition Conference where Purina was asked to participate in a round table discussion on prebiotic and probiotic use in feeds. We were asked to write an abstract for the scientific proceedings as follows: As a panel...
- Behind The Scenes....looking Intense
In this blog, you get to see a lot of good research going on and learn about our travels across the country. But behind all this fun is the hard work that takes place in front of a computer, in meetings and through group efforts that plan...
- Are Extruded Feeds Easier For A Horse To Digest?
If you have ever fed a commercial dog food product, you know what an extruded feed looks like. Extrusion is simply the process of pushing a mix of heated feed ingredients through small holes under high pressure. You don’t see many extruded horse feeds...
- No Break In R&d For The New Year!
We are trying to get readjusted after the completion of our exercise physiology test in December. After our last data collection day we moved all of the exercise horses out to pasture for a well deserved break. Our broodmares and open mares have all...
- Running For The Roses At The Purina Research Farm This Week!
One of our favorite things to do at the research farm is conduct exercise physiology studies. We have a phenomenal set up with a high speed treadmill and Equi-ciser that we use regularly for experiments, training, weight maintenance and other research...