Horse Metabolism And Hormones – An Introduction

The fluids of the body are the magic that makes all the cells and organs work.  This river of life carries in it gasses (oxygen, nitrogen), fuels (glucose, ketone bodies), messengers (hormones, pre-hormones), workers (enzymes, building and repair materials), scouts (proteins looking for damage of foreign materials) and defenders (immune system parts).  

When 2 or more cells joined to make a living organism billions of years ago they developed a system to cover all the bases of survival. This communication between cells developed into the fluid system we now see bathing every cell in the body.  Together these subsystems create the interactions between and within cells called metabolism.  Another way to think of metabolism is to think of it as life and lack of metabolism causes death.

These topics cover how metabolism works and what happens when they don’t work.  Specifically, if the hormones work incorrectly then messages that regulate body functions report misinformation.  If the immune system is blind to an attack or if it overreacts the body suffers like an error from a player in a game.  The most common problems with metabolism are not errors but adaptations to the environment.  When the environment is changed (an ice age or the overabundance of food) the body adapts to this to help the horse survive.  This is good when changes occur over thousands of years but it is bad when it happens within a lifetime.