Laminitis Season: The Spring and Fall Talk Every Owner Dreads

If you have ever watched a horse founder, you never forget it. The rocked-back stance, the reluctance to move, the way they try to shift weight off feet that hurt with every step. It is one of the most painful things that can happen to a horse — and one of the most quietly heartbreaking, because so often it was preventable.

So twice a year, a specific dread creeps in for those of us who have been through it. Spring, when the pastures explode green after the first warm rains. And fall, which catches a lot of people off guard. Both are laminitis seasons, and both deserve a real conversation instead of a vague worry. Let me walk through what I have learned to actually watch — not to frighten you, but so the dread turns into a short list of manageable habits.

What laminitis actually is (in plain terms)

Laminitis is inflammation and damage to the laminae — the intricate, velcro-like tissues that bond the hoof wall to the coffin bone inside the foot. When those tissues fail, the bone can rotate or sink. That is founder, and it is as serious as it sounds. The feet are where it shows, but the cause very often lives elsewhere in the body — usually in metabolism and diet.

That disconnect is exactly why it sneaks up on people. We are watching for a hoof problem, but the trigger was a metabolic one that had been building quietly.

Why spring and fall specifically

Here is the piece that took me years to really understand: it is about the sugar in the grass. Pasture grass makes and stores sugars (called fructans and simple sugars) through photosynthesis, and those levels swing dramatically with the seasons and even the time of day.

In spring, fast-growing lush grass after rain is loaded with sugar. In fall, cool sunny days followed by cold nights cause grass to hoard sugar — the plant photosynthesizes in the day but the cold night stops it from using what it made, so it sits there in the blades. That is why a horse can founder on short, stressed, frost-touched autumn grass that looks completely harmless. The grass is short but sugar-packed.

Even within a day it swings: pasture sugar is typically lowest in the very early morning and highest in late afternoon on a sunny day. Little facts like these change how you manage turnout during the risky windows.

Who is most at risk

Not every horse is equally vulnerable, and knowing your own horse's risk level changes everything:

• The easy keeper / the "air fern." The pony or horse who gets fat on a dry lot and a look at hay is often the classic candidate.
• Horses with a cresty neck, fat pads, or a history of being overweight. Regional fat deposits are a real red flag.
• Horses with EMS (Equine Metabolic Syndrome) or PPID / Cushing's. These metabolic conditions dramatically raise laminitis risk, which is why the senior and metabolic horses deserve extra vigilance in these seasons. (I've written before about managing the metabolic and senior horse — this is the acute danger those conditions carry.)
• Any horse who has foundered before. Once it has happened, that horse is far more likely to have it happen again. They earn lifelong caution.

The small habits that actually lower the risk

Here is the good news: prevention is mostly a set of dull, doable habits, not heroics.

Manage the grass, not just the horse. For at-risk horses, that means limiting time on lush pasture during the danger seasons, using a grazing muzzle (which can cut intake dramatically while still letting them move and socialize), turning out in the early morning rather than late afternoon, or using a dry lot during the worst surges. A track system or a smaller sacrifice paddock is a lifesaver for the truly at-risk.

Keep body condition honest. This is the big one. Obesity is one of the strongest predictors, and it creeps up so slowly we stop seeing it. Learn to body-condition score, put your hands on your horse regularly, and be honest about weight before it becomes a crisis. A weight you track over time tells you the truth your eyes stop seeing.

Know your at-risk horses' baselines. Get the metabolic horses tested and managed with your vet. Watch for the early warning signs — a suddenly cresty neck, a horse who is "footy" or shifting weight, a bounding digital pulse in the feet, heat in the hooves. Catching the earliest hint and pulling a horse off grass that day can be the difference between a scare and a catastrophe.

Talk to your farrier and vet before the season, not during the emergency. A good trim, good baseline radiographs for previous founder cases, and a plan you already agreed on beat a panicked 9pm phone call.

Keep the picture in one place

The reason laminitis blindsides people is that the warning signs are scattered — a weight creeping up over months, a metabolic diagnosis, a cresty neck someone noticed in July, a footy day back in the spring. Each one alone looks minor. Together they are a flashing warning light.

That is honestly why I keep weight history, health-check notes, and each horse's risk factors somewhere I can actually see them together, rather than trusting my memory across a whole busy year. It's the quiet value of the health-tracking side of EquiNexus — not fancy, just a place where "he's looked a little heavy lately" and "his neck is cresty" and "he foundered two springs ago" all live in one spot, so the pattern is obvious before it becomes an emergency.

Laminitis is one of the few genuinely devastating things in horse-keeping that we can often prevent with boring diligence. Respect the spring flush, respect the frost-touched fall grass, know your at-risk horses cold, and keep your eyes and hands on them through both seasons. The dread never fully goes away — but it can shrink down to a short, calm checklist. And that checklist protects the animals we would do anything for.