by Gudmar Petursson from L’Espirit Icelandics in La Grange, Kentucky

I decided to take some time to sit down and put on paper my experience and everything I know about SE. I hope that people can use this in any way to prevent summer excema on their own horses!

How we take care of our horses:

Any horse that is not too fat or does not have any sign of SE goes out every night about 7-8 pm. And they are put in again the next morning between 6-9 am. (depending on how hot it is) While staying inside, each horse has its own fan, which we only turn on if it is hot. The stalls are cleaned every single day; we also have automatic flyspray come on about 4 times a day. Therefore the barn does not have many flies at all.

We have been using different flysprays, RepellX, Tri-tec14, and now we are using Pyranha which is supposed to be very good.

A horse has never developed a SE at our barn although I have seen some sign of it starting (maybe a little scab on their stomach). If this occurs, they go to the other group with the fatties, which are the horses we keep in most of the time (with their fans going and automatic flyspray 4-5 times a day) except putting them out for few hours every single day during the day when it is hot; but remember, it is during dawn and dusk when the flies are really agressive. It is not the heat that bothers them so much. Now some people are going to say how bad a person I am to keep them so much in, or my horse does not want to stay in, well of course the horses like to stay out most of the time. I sometimes say that horses are like little kids you give them an inch and they take a mile. If your kid would have sun exzema I am sure he would like to be out more then you would let him. I am doing my horse a favour by keeping him in so he doesn’t have a breakout. In the long run it saves them a lot of grief even though they might not appreciate it so much at that time. Personally I look at the summers in the US like winters in Iceland where the horses are kept in away from the cold to be able to ride them (because you dont want to put a sweaty horse out to cold winter weather). During the winter, spring and fall your horse can be as much out side as you like him to be, we are only talking about 4 months out of the year.

Before letting them out we put flyspray on them and if there are some places where they have open skin or exzema we put swat on those spots. By doing it this way, every horse we have gotten with SE goes home almost or even completely free of it. I also believe that flies are attracted to the sweat of the horse, that is why we always hose them of with clean water after each ride, to get the sweat of and also to cool them down of course.

But I do believe that if you have a horse that does not have a SE you can make your care quite alot easier then we are doing it. We are training this horses every day and that is part of the reason we put them up in a stall. What you need to do is to have a shed for the horses where they can get away from flies totally; that does not meen a tree or by a wall. They need to be able to go into some place where there are no flies because I believe that SE does does not start so easily if the horses are alway kept away from the flies part of the day so the can always recover between fly bites. But here is something that we need to keep in mind. As you probably have noticed, Icelandic horses eat as long as there is grass in front of them (at least most of them) so it is not enough to provide them with this fly free place, if there is free access to it from the pasture. They will just stay outside and eat even, though the flies are eating them up. So either you have to close them in this place or do like one very good friend of mine here in KY did after I advised him to do so. He has a dry lot where there is no grass, only gravel or sand just so it does not get muddy. He puts them in there every morning, and from there the horses can go into there stalls where there fan is going. These horses always go in to the stalls and they sometimes stay all in the same stall even though there are two stalls, but they are totally bug free.

I can also tell you another story about another friend of mine here in KY. She has a few Icelandics. For the last couple years she has been keeping them in a pasture where there is no shade except some trees and there also is a dirty pond there. 2 of her horses developed SE. Last summer I told her "next spring before they get SE, bring them up to the upper pasture where they can go into the barn and where there is no dirty pond". She did and they did not get any SE at all.

Here are my thoughts on SE:

• The important part is to stop it before it starts.
• Take your horse away from the flies part of the day even though he has no sign of SE, If they have a problem keeping weight on you have to make it up with enough hay and or grain supplements.
• Just by keeping an exzema free horse inside, away from flies for just half of the day can have a great positive effect on keeping your horse from ever getting exzema, because he is not spending ALL of his time defending against flies.
• Wash the sweat off the horse after each ride.
• And of course use flyspray.

If they already have SE:

• Keep them in most of the time but make sure to turn them out for at least a couple hours every day.
• Give them a bath once and while!
• Keep fly spray on them, and always have the SE spots covered with something like swat.
• Keep everything around the horse as clean as possible and keep fans on him.

Just by keeping the exzema horse in at night (especially dawn and dusk!) makes a huge difference!!

There are two things that have been a common misunderstanding concerning the Icelandic horse. That is, they don’t need the same care as other horse breeds (i.e. Can be left out 24/7 in some field with no shelter) because of their hardy nature and the other is they do not require any kind of grain or feed supplement. Although these horses ARE very hardy, and can SURVIVE under harsh conditions, this does not mean that they do not deserve the same care and treatment as other horses. Any horse needs a shelter from the sun or the wind. The grass and hay in Iceland has many more vitamins and minerals than most hay in America. It is the high cellulose content in some hays that can cause founder, NOT because these horses cannot handle protein or good quality hay.