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Plants are capable of “taking up” various minerals from the soil. Examples include zinc, copper, and selenium. Other examples include the toxic heavy metal cadmium and even radioactive strontium. Horses can therefore serve as important indicators of environmental pollution as they ingest the elements taken up by plants. Those pollutants can localize in various tissues in the horse’s body, such as the liver and kidneys.

A group of German researchers* recently measured the concentration of a variety of elements in the kidneys and livers of 21 horses.

What did they find on their element exploration?

  • Different elements are stored in different organs. For example, copper and zinc are stored equally between liver and the cortex (outer shell) of the kidneys, but cadmium, a toxic element, was stored primarily in the kidney.
  • Some elements were found in higher amounts in horses of different ages. Selenium, for example, was higher in horses aged 5 to 8, but lower in younger and older horses.
  • Certain toxic elements, like cadmium, were higher in horses than other grazing species, such as cattle. One explanation is that horses typically live longer than cattle and therefore are important indicators for environmental pollution of toxins, such as cadmium.
  • Horses grazing in areas known to be contaminated with lead did indeed have high levels of lead in the liver and those levels increased with age.

Environmental pollutants impact our horses, and the levels of those pollutants can vary in terms of physical location in the horse, geographical location of grazing plots, age and sex of animal, and even year of grazing.

* Paßlack, N., B. Mainzer, M. Lahrssen-Wiederholt, et al. 2014. Concentrations of strontium, barium, cadmium, copper, zinc, manganese, chromium, antimony, selenium and lead in the equine liver and kidneys. Springerplus 3:343.

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