Coffee in Horse Food

Horses are high strung animals and do not need to be stimulated any further. Whether you seek to enhance his performance or perk him up, never resort to coffee. Horses usually do not like a bitter taste, unless it is heavily loaded with cream and sugar. However, neither cream nor sugar is good for a horse. Even if your horse is lacking in zest, do not him coffee.

The usual standard unit of measurement in horse feeds is a coffee can full. Barns and stables usually do not have measuring cups but they do have coffee cans. Plastic measuring cups can blow away or be chewed by rodents. Glass measuring cups break and could shatter inside of expensive feed. Although some feed manufacturers now use quarts or cups as a standard of measurement, many still recommend feeding a horse by so many coffee cans full of feed per day.

Caffeine (the ingredient in coffee that wakes you up) is banned by horse events, including flat racing, harness racing, steeple chasing and all of the Olympic equestrian events. It is considered a performance enhancing drug, stimulates the horse's body to make more blood sugar and makes a horse less aware of fatigue. Caffeine is detected in horses through urine and blood tests.

Coffee is an illegal drug in horse racing. Image from Wikimedia Commons.Coffee has been discovered to be a drug used in the doping of race horses. This can be given to the horse directly to drink, mixed into feed, or given as intramuscular injections. Horses can be accidentally doped with coffee should it spill into their feed, or even if a groom's hands had coffee spilled on them and it gets into feed or if they are fed coffee-flavored sweets as a treat. It takes a very small amount to cause a positive result, 2 parts per million.

Horse owners need to be aware of all of the ingredients in the supplements or herbal medications they give their horses. Some feeds or food supplements may claim to have no caffeine but the ingredients may list guarana, ginseng, caffeol or coffee beans, which will give positive caffeine results on horse drug tests. These sorts of supplements are usually powders that are mixed into the feed.

Horses can develop strange addictions in food, including coffee. But too much caffeine can make a horse sick with symptoms similar to hyperthermia. The symptoms are excessive sweating, fever, fast or irregular heart beat, inability to relax muscles, diarrhea and shallow breathing. This needs vet attention immediately as caffeine poisoning can be lethal.