Do Horses Eat Horse Chestnuts?

Horses do eat horse chestnuts (or conkers). However, they can get ill after eating raw horse chestnuts, the casings or the leaves. The nuts must be processed. Although it is unclear why these trees are called horse chestnuts, one theory is that the nuts were fed to horses when grazing was poor. It is a tradition in Turkey to feed horse chestnuts to horses that are having problems with gas.

If horses are bored and the grazing is poor, they will put anything in their mouths to see if it edible. Some horses do find the taste of horse chestnuts, their flowers and their leaves appealing, but then they eat too much and get digestive problems. Horses will prefer to eat grass or hay when they have a choice. Horse chestnut trees may have to be removed if eating the nuts becomes a habit for the horses.

Horse chestnuts can be an ingredient in cattle and horse feed, especially in Asia, where the horse chestnut tree originated. First, the nuts are soaked in lime-water (calcium hydroxide) in order to make them more palatable. Then, they are ground up and added to the feed. Another way of processing the nuts is to crush the nuts, soak them in cold water overnight, strain and grind to be soft.

Horse chestnuts are about 14 percent starch, so they can make a filling food for horses. More and more horse chestnuts are being used as horse feed ingredients. It takes less land to grow a grove of horse chestnut trees than it does to grow barley or oats. As farming land becomes scarcer, horse chestnuts may become more prominent as a horse, cattle and sheep feed.

These include diarrhea, muscles tremors, dilated pupils and loss of coordination. Horse chestnut poisoning is rare and usually not fatal, but veterinary care is needed right away to help stabilize the horse and stop the diarrhea. The poison inside of a raw horse chestnut and the leaves of the tree is called aesculin. This is more concentrated in the flowers and leaves than in the nuts.

Although there are several species of horse chestnut, the usual tree referred to is Aesculus hippocastanum. It is not related to the sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa), but is related to the buckeye (Aesculus glabra). The nuts are also used to make extracts for cosmetics and alternative therapies, gunpowder, bleach, paste and as a coffee substitute.