Since those happy days I've watched modern progress change the horse world I knew back then beyond all recognition, with chemically-driven agriculture leading to very un-natural and poor-quality junk-food feed systems, and management techniques the likes that had never previously been witnessed, let alone even conceived. And all radically changing how the horse has naturally - and perfectly happily - evolved over millenia.

For me, my horse world started to go horribly wrong in the mid-2000's, where I had a massive wake-up call and had to run at top-speed back to a more natural ideal and methodology. Turning to herbs in desperation completely changed my horse-world, and a new business - EquiNatural - was born, completely by accident. Here's our story.

Quick intro ...

In 2006 my beautiful horse herd collectively became very sick due to their then-unknown toxic environment. I didn't know why, and neither did my vet, so I had to figure it out myself. Over time, and a whole lot of studying, I learned how - and why - their health had become so compromised, and a lot of it had to do with the myriad of different feedbags filled with what we now know to be pro-inflammatory, gut-damaging ingredients that I was feeding them, because I believed the hype and spin stamped on all that packaging.

Coincidentally, I was also going through the motions of attempting to take my horses barefoot, which gave me a whole new awareness of the unnecessary bulk fillers in many equine feeds. As a result I began studying everything I could find on equine health, and immersed myself in every nutrition model out there. Along the way I discovered many amazing equine gurus, one of which was Juliet Getty of Getty Nutrition who had a great phrase, and I quote:

"The only way to fix your horse is to help them return to their natural state. Feeding your horse in a manner

 that is contrary to their innate physiological needs is making their body scream for help."

This made a whole lot of sense to me - to bring my horses back to wellness became my obsession. The more I studied, the more it became very clear to me how crucial it was to feed them as they were evolved, optimising their diet and nutrition levels with species-appropriate food, alongside bioactive phytonutrients (herbs), and balanced minerals, in order to support their metabolisms. And above all, it was vital to restore and maintain their gut health to make sure their natural inbuilt detox system functioned at the highest level possible.

EquiNatural evolved from my educational journey, and led me towards The Institute of Functional Medicine, which recognises that the body is a complex, dynamic, adaptive, whole system, and in order to optimise health we need to nutrify the body with intelligent, natural components that function, that (a) know what to do in the body, (b) the body’s already familiar with, and (c) can repair the body naturally in ways that conventional medicine can’t.

Functional medicine is about helping the body naturally regulate itself to support its own innate repair systems, and not about a single drug, with a single action, with a single outcome, for a single disease. Or as the saying goes, "A pill for every ill."

This is all well and good, but for a kid who dropped the sciences at school and frankly didn't know her Co2 from her H2o, how the heck did I even get here?

It all started . . .

. . . back in the 1960's when after years of me nagging my ever-patient mother, she finally took me for my very first riding lesson when I was 7-years old. You could say it began earlier than that, as my maternal grandmother put a stuffed donkey in my crib when I was born. I still have Donk to this day.

Anyway, on a lovely summer's day in 1965, I was introduced to Wichy, a beautiful white Connemara Princess-Pony, with a long flowing mane, a coat soft as cashmere, and warm, sweet breath. My heart melted; if anyone can remember back then, there was a TV series called 'White Horses', which I gave up Brownies to watch. Wichy was my real-life 'White Horse', and I can still remember every second of that day.

From then on I never looked back. I was the typical pony-mad kid, spending every spare moment helping out at that same riding school right through my teens, which by sheer fluke just happened to by run by one of today's esteemed equestrian families, Marion and Peter Larrigan and their daughter Tanya. By my early teens Tanya was already an Olympic junior team-member and became one of Britain's leading international dressage riders and classical trainers. Talk about right place, right time. Lucky me.

By the mid 1970's and now aged 16, I became a live-in Working Pupil with the Larrigans to train for the 1-Year BHSAI exam, and became Tanya's show groom. I didn't only just learn the AI syllabus from them though; the Larrigans were very unique communicators with their horses; there wasn't a hint of control or dominance that we sadly see so often today.

Once out in the big world, it wasn't hard for me to lean towards what is now generically known as 'natural horsemanship'. As the 'natural' concept grew over the years, I dipped in and out until I found my own natural direction. How I tumbled into EquiNatural a few decades later, however, was quite by chance.

Fast forward to 2007 . . .

I'm in my 50th year, and for the last couple of years I've watched, helpless, as my beautiful horses have metabolically crashed in front of me.

But first, let me introduce Kelso, a charming gentleman of a former show cob, whom we'd originally met a couple of years previously via our trainer. (Trainer?! Hang on - me needing a trainer?! Aha, read on ...)

In August 2006, Kelso joined our family as my husband's horse. We knew Kelso well as we'd fostered him for 6-months when our trainer had previously been unwell. We also knew he came with baggage - 'allergy' was his middle name. He had chronic sweet-itch with deep-rooted, habitual red-raw scratching, but I was perfectly happy to manage this conventionally with the usual paraphernalia of fly rugs and face masks. He was also a major-league head-shaker, enough to throw himself to the ground. (Oh if only I knew then what I know now ... if ever there was a KPU candidate, it was Kelso.)

However, he also came to us with previously not seen, seriously brittle and crumbling hooves, plus a worrying hacking cough which, back then, for August, was very unusual. The now well-recognised 'seasonal pollen allergy response' hadn't yet been acknowledged by mainstream veterinary practice back then; the only respiratory term banded around back then was COPD/aka chest infection, which as far as we all knew only appeared during winter.

Literally within a week of Kelso coming to live with us permanently, he was now coughing and wheezing so badly, with such extreme heave lines and nostril flare, that he literally couldn't get in enough breath to walk. His respiratory system seemed to be in meltdown. The vet diagnosed a secondary chest infection and he was prescribed the usual cocktail of bute, antibiotics and Ventipulmin.

Two weeks later and Kelso was much worse, now completely confined to a stable because he literally couldn't find the breath to step out of it. The vet represcribed a further 2-weeks' worth of the same meds, which only made him worse still. Kelso was now in a critical state after a month of pharma drug intervention. Having also banked £1500 of my hard-earned cash, the vet suggested glibly that as Kelso was an old chap, it would be best to have him put to sleep. Hang on. Old?! He was only 17! Plus we'd only had him for a month ...

Having gone through the emotional wringer for the last month, I now turned into a fire-breathing menopausal dragon-lady (which you really shouldn't mess with). I simply refused to accept what the vet was saying, with every sinew in my body screaming that he'd got it badly wrong. So, I did what any reasonably educated woman on a mission to get her horse better would do. I hit the World Wide Web.

I knew I was clutching at straws but I had this mad idea that maybe those whacky things called herbs could help our big man - weren't they meant to be medicinal?! I hit every online Herbal Medica I could find, and lost sleep researching every herby web page I landed on. I finally put together a list of apparent bronchial-busting herbs that said they could fix our chap. I bought the lot the second our local whacky herb shop opened for around £30.00, shook it all up in a freezer bag, and gave him a double dose for breakfast, crossing everything I had to cross.

(I should also add that I was fast becoming an outcast to many on the livery yard, that I was being cruel keeping him alive, that Kelso was an absolute welfare case, and with everyone hissing at me that he should be PTS.)

And yet ...

Kelso's response was astonishing. Remember, this was a horse at death's door, yet within just 48-hours on those whacky dried herbs his nostril flare and wheezing were significantly reduced. By Day-3 his wheezing had completely stopped and his eyes had a spark in them again. Within 5-days he stepped out from his stable, and on day-7 he was back out with his buddies. A week later I hopped on his back and we started doing gentle walks on the flat. Kelso not only survived, but thrived for several more years.

The EquiNatural seed was about to be sown

The stress of watching Kelso worsen for a full, long, month, only to get a PTS prognosis at the end of it and emptying my bank account ... well, I was almighty angry. I'd lost all confidence in our vet, considering a simple blend of herbs that I was able to google had not only given Kelso immediate symptomatic relief but got him completely better within days, and at a fraction of the cost as well.

Life soon went back to normal for us all, but as we headed into winter, and with the other liveries apparently having forgiven me for my 'cruelty', one of them had a COPD horse who was no longer responding to Ventipulmin. She asked if I could put together some 'Kelso Herbs' for her, so of course I did. A couple of days later, her horse was much improved.

Soon I was bagging up more bundles of Kelso's Herbs, then one day someone casually suggested I should sell them on eBay. Seriously? I didn't know much about herbs, but inspired, by December I had an eBay page. Kelso's Herbs were given a new name, BreathePlus, so named because those herbs had literally got Kelso breathing again.

To my utter astonishment, the Ebay page went nuts. By end Jan 2008, we also had a website of sorts. Thanks to Kelso, my life was starting to change. The learning, however, had only just begun.

The bit in the middle - our horse-world goes horribly wrong

From the Surrey Hills for my childhood, to the South Downs as an adult - it didn't get much better than that for trail riding, which was where I was happiest having been 'raised' by a riding school and trekking centre. Then, come early 2000's, me and my Connemara, Murphy, moved to Wiltshire, where the newly acquired husband and I rented 7-acres of (what we thought were) perfect grazing. Unkempt, overgrown, unfertilised; even better, private!

Right on the edge of Salisbury Plain, we were tucked underneath the White Horse of Westbury, with sweeping landscape surrounded by miles of agricrops and heady yellow rapeseed. The only blot on the landscape was a concrete factory a couple of miles west of us with a huge eyesore chimney that belched out its smoke cloud over us with the westerly winds. We knew it was burning because the air always smelt of kids cap-guns.

Within 6-months we started to notice small changes in our horses - lethargic, less friendly, just generally out of sorts. Bromley, my husband’s schoolmaster and beautifully mannered NF, became positively evil; he bit, kicked, rear-ended, and started refusing to leave the yard. He threw the nastiest naps imaginable, many of them on the main roads just when an articulated truck was going by. It wasn’t long before we were referring to him as ‘dangerous’. When husband finally ended up with several cracked ribs, he understandably threw in the towel.

Meanwhile, little Dinky, Tabatha's first pony (husband's daughter) literally crashed overnight with unexpected laminitis in all four hooves. Murf didn't get off lightly either - his gut went into overdrive. Repeat spasmodic colic episodes, seriously projectile faecal-water and liquid gas, pounding digi pulses, and mega-spooky. My mellow, calm, laid-back boy had changed to a wide-eyed, fearful psychotic, and he frankly started to scare me when riding out, which for me was unheard of.

Our once-chilled herd had partnered with the devil within months of moving to Wiltshire. At the time I was clueless - as the saying goes, 'If only I'd known then what I know now', but back then all I could see were the symptoms. We spent a fortune on every specialist we could find; backs, teeth, saddles, bodyworkers - but nothing changed.

The only option I felt I had left was to get a trainer on board and try to out-school these 'behaviours' that Brom and Murf had developed. This was tough for me; after all, I'm a qualified instructor, trained with the Larrigan's, and here I was feeling like a fearful novice, making pretty much every excuse not to ride and now ringing round for a trainer.

Knowing what I know now, when I think back to that time of forcing Murf against his will in the school, when all the time it was me not listening to him because he was brainfogged with deep systemic toxic inflammation and pain, I am still mortified with guilt. I think he's forgiven me. I hope he's forgiven me ...

Definition of Co-Incidence

" A remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection"

Wikipedia

Kelso's August chest infection had been the start of my starting to question - then demanding - answers for what was going on in my horse world. Him getting seriously ill took me towards herbs as therapeutics and had created a fledgling business which got me studying again, which in itself started to effect profound changes in how I kept my horses.

The same summer Kelso came to live with us, we also moved house to be nearer Tabby's new school. We swapped to the Somerset side of Salisbury Plain, a very different landscape to the open plains of Wiltshire, with dairy and sheep and not a crop in sight. Gradually I began to notice that our horses were becoming more like their old selves again - Murf seemed more like his old laid-back self, seemingly happy to be with me again, and his gut seemed much more settled. Life appeared to slowly be getting back to normal.

It was now time to address Kelso's crumbling hooves. He was constantly tripping and unable to keep a shoe on, and after relentless visits from the farrier we were all at a loss as to what to do. I'd heard on the periphery of this thing called 'barefoot', and finally decided to scratch my itch and have a look at it. Thing is, the mid-2000s were still very early days in barefoot-ville with very little information around, so I hit the search engines and discovered Nic Barker of Rockley Farm, a specialist equine rehabilitation centre for horses with hoof-related lameness.

Nic had also created a barefoot-trimmers/practitioners school (UKNHCP - UK Natural Hoof Care Practioners) with its own forum, full of advice and support for people who'd taken the barefoot plunge. Not out of whimsical desire, let me assure you - back then only an idiot would do so as 'barefoot' was a very dirty word, pronounced 'cruel' and a 'cult' in the mainstream, conventional, and as yet unenlightened horse-world. Trust me when I say the H&H forum was not a friendly place.

As I soon learned, the H&H mob weren't appreciating that the reason people were turning to barefoot was because they were literally in Last-Chance-Hoof-Corrall. Alongside wrecked hooves, the 'navicular' word also kept cropping up and many horses were crippled with it. Owners were desperate - it was either PTS or trying this thing called barefoot.

Invaluable for barefoot advice, I learned early on from the UKNHCP forum that diet and environment were two key factors - Nic even wrote a 5*-rated book on it all - 'Performance Hoof, Performance Horse'. I learned about the damaging metabolic effects of the numerous chemical treatments used on feedbag ingredients, which led me to study more about toxicity overload in our horses' systems.

As everyone on the barefoot UKNHCP forum was doing, I promptly dumped the shiny feedbags that I'd been drawn to by their spin and fake promises, and stripped my horses' feed back to a more approprite grass forage-based feedbowl. Track systems became the buzzword to keep horses off grass, so I put up a simple track to enable constant movement for my horses, with lots of hay stations. With his shoes off, a more equine-appropriate diet, a track system with restricted grass access, and a very early version of the UKNHCP forum-recommended mineral mix (which in 2012 became our EquiVita), Kelso's hooves made a miraculous recovery.

On the strength of Kelso's success, I took all my horses barefoot. Happy that we seemed to be heading back to the good old days before Brom and Murf became sick, I put the positive changes down to my new knowledge - going barefoot, better understanding of feed and the novel track system - it certainly seemed that everything was coming together. However, the final part of the jigsaw was about to reveal itself when I started talking with another horse owner who just happened to be an equine nutritionist, so unlike me at the time had a much better understanding of the inner-workings of the horse. And like us, had also watched their herd metabolically crash after moving.

The only factor they could pinpoint was that they’d chemically sprayed their own fields for the first time. They also noticed they could taste chemicals in the air when the local farmland was sprayed and the air drifted over their property. Coincidence? Was this what had happened with us back in Wiltshire with the local agricrop spraying and that flipping chimney?

Everything started making sense. Our previous home environment had slowly been damaging every fibre of our horses' systems, caused by the local crop-spraying chemical exposure with airborne fertilisers and the full buffet of the 'ides' - pesticides, fungicides, herbicides - alongside that chimney dumping its toxic sulphur cloud onto our grazing. I was reminded of reading the Letters page in the local paper from angry locals demanding answers from the Environment Agency on the air quality. Gradually I began to put it all together.

A major turning point

I now realised the importance of 'environment' as a whole. It wasn't just about having a nice field and a stress-free yard for my horses to live in; it was also very much about the actual environment - the very air, water, soil quality, and the grass they were grazing on.

Thanks to a series of coincidences, I'd finally found the answers to my horses' mystery syndrome. Thanks to moving away from agri-crops' chemical sprays, and my newfound barefoot knowledge, I'd also learned some eye-opening facts about the chemical processes on horse feedbag ingredients. With the growing body of evidence I was building from my somewhat obsessive research, together with my newly acquired herbal studying, I had a fair idea of the direction I wanted - needed - to take, to ensure my horses never experienced such devastating effects on their health again.

That was all back in the mid-2000s. Almost 2-decades on, Murphy is still very much with me, now a grand 30-years old, with everyone saying how amazing he looks for his age. Maybe together we did something right ...

To conclude

I've since completed many training programmes, and continue each day to supplement my training with regular research and studies via useful sources such as The Institute of Functional Medicine (IFM), https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/, https://scholar.google.com/, Dr Eleanor Kellon, Dr Christina Fritz and Dr Juliet Getty, as well as many publications including "Equine Applied and Clinical Nutrition", an essential bible for horse care.

• 2007/8 Equine Nutrition as a Therapy
• 2009 Nutrient Digestion in the Equine Gastrointestinal Tract
• 2009 Feeding the Metabolic Syndrome Horse
• 2009 NRC Plus http://www.drkellon.com/coursedescriptions.html
• 2011 Equine Soundness Hoofcare programme
• 2012 Coursera Equine Nutrition, University of Edinburgh
• 2016-2020 School of Herbal Medicine - Medical Herbalist
• 2017 IFM - The Truth About Cancer (from a naturopathic, functional medicine perspective)
• 2018 IFM - The Real Skinny on Fat (from a naturopathic, functional medicine perspective)
• 2018 IFM - Ancient Medicine for Modern Illness (studying Naturopathy, Western Herbalism, Ayurvedic, Amazonian, and Traditional Chinese Medicine)
• 2021 - Feed your Horse Fit (Dr Christina Fritz), biologist with a PhD in Animal Physiology/Neurobiology. Dr Fritz has been treating horses since 2006 focusing on metabolic therapy using holistic feeding methods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDHEg71_-04. Incorporating:
• Domesticated horses VS. wild horses
• Digestive physiology
• Food (all possible raw materials, ingredients and types of food are reviewed)
• How the metabolism works and how the substances in the food are used by the body
• What is healthy food for the horse (hay management, mineral nutrition, balancers, concentrates
• Why our horses develop "lifestyle diseases“ like excess weight or skin afflictions
• How does "detoxification“ work on a physiological level?
• Liver and Kidney function explained
• Cryptopyrroluria (KPU) - a common health issue underlying many metabolic symptoms like sweet itch, laminitis etc
• How to see if your horse has health problems and what are the early markers for metabolic problems
• Different primal types of horses and the influence of the primal qualities on the contemporary horse
• The difference between storage of waste in fat or connective tissue (and the consequences)
• The difference between fat, lymphatic or muscular horses (and how to manage them)
• 2024 - Sacred Science - The Ancient Roots of Real Medicine (from a naturopathic, functional medicine perspective)
• The Forgotten Secrets of Food
• Nourishing the Inner Ecosystem
• Strengthening Defences
• Cognitive Brain-Boosting
• Time-Tested Cardiovascular Care
• Zest & Zen: Better Sleep & Boundless Energy
• Skin & Hair
• Healing Hormones

Finally, the EquiNatural herd

... who have given me the opportunity to extensively research their individual predisposed syndromes - EMS/IR (Murf/MacAttack/Cookie); all things gut - colic/hindgut dysbiosis/leaky gut/faecal water (Murf): autoimmunity/pollen allergy/sweet itch/respiratory (Kelso); Cushing's/PPID (Dinky/Cookie), KPU and the worst sweet itch I've ever seen (MacAttack), stress/eye health (Pops); the vital importance of detoxing - all of our wonderful horse family!

However, I'll be the first to put my hand in the air and say I'm no vet, nor am I here to replace professional veterinary advice - I couldn't possibly. For me it's all about keeping an open mind, with a foot in both the conventional and natural camps and knowing when to use what. Above all though, being accepting of new science and at all times analysing and evaluating factual evidence in an unbiased way.

Even though I'm now comfortably in my middle-age, at heart I'm still that pony-mad kid - I'm just a perfectly ordinary horse person who just happens to have studied the life out of every equine nutrition model out there, speaking with other normal horse people just like me who were/are struggling with their horse's health. If my experience can help another owner help their horse, this is what it's all about for me.

My life's overriding passion has always been my horses - they were my first love from childhood, and these days they're the reason I get out of bed in the morning - well, them, the dogs, cats and chooks, and at one time our two much-loved pet sheep. Over the years I've watched my horses grow and interact with as natural a lifestyle as I've been able to provide for them, and each one of them has been responsible for many of the blends that we’ve put together under the EquiNatural banner.

Without doubt, my horses have been, and will continue to be, my greatest teachers, and I couldn't love them more.

Carol Moreton
Founder, EquiNatural