Gut microbiota resilience in horse athletes following holidays out to pasture

Abstract

Elite horse athletes that live in individual boxes and train and compete for hours experience long-term physical and mental stress that compromises animal welfare and alters the gut microbiota. We therefore assessed if a temporary period out to pasture with conspecifics could improve animal welfare and in turn, favorably affect intestinal microbiota composition. A total of 27 athletes were monitored before and after a period of 1.5 months out to pasture, and their fecal microbiota and behavior profiles were compared to those of 18 horses kept in individual boxes. The overall diversity and microbiota composition of pasture and control individuals were temporally similar, suggesting resilience to environmental challenges. However, pasture exposure induced an increase in Ruminococcus and Coprococcus that lasted 1-month after the return to individual boxes, which may have promoted beneficial effects on health and welfare. Associations between the gut microbiota composition and behavior indicating poor welfare were established. Furthermore, withdrawn behavior was associated with the relative abundances of Lachnospiraceae AC2044 group and Clostridiales family XIII. Both accommodate a large part of butyrate-producing bacterial genera. While we cannot infer causality within this study, arguably, these findings suggest that management practices maintained over a longer period of time may moderate the behavior link to the gut ecosystem beyond its resilience potential.

The Airway Pathobiome in Complex Respiratory Diseases: A Perspective in Domestic Animals

“…This likely holds true for the respiratory microbiota. Our previous findings in the gut (Mach et al, 2020;Mach et al, 2021a;Mach et al, 2021b) also highlight the possibility that the airway microbiota may be particularly sensitive to where a horse lives and what a horse does. In fact, short-term changes in housing and forage type alters the pulmonary microbiota in horses (Fillion-Bertrand et al, 2019), as well as the contact with animals and people who work at horse facilities, veterinary health care and medication (Kauter et al, 2019).…”

“…The gut of ruminants (Ramayo-Caldas et al, 2019), pigs (Mach et al, 2015;Ramayo-Caldas et al, 2016), horses (Mach et al, 2020;Mach et al, 2021a), companion animals (Alessandri et al, 2020) and chickens (Rychlik, 2020) accommodates a complex community of microorganisms that live in a commensal relationship with their hosts and provide significant contributions to the metabolism and immune responses. It might be hypothesized that in symbiosis, gut microbiota ensures the uptake of microbial metabolites that favorably affects the immune and endocrine pathways involved in respiratory disease and progression, whereas the lungs maintain inflammatory homeostasis in the gut by controlling immune response.…”

The first horse gut microbiome gene catalog reveals that rare microbiome ensures better cardiovascular fitness in endurance horses

“…Detailed description of the DNA isolation process, V3-V4 16S rRNA gene sequencing-PCR amplification is presented by our group 11,12,17,57,63,65,66 .…”

“…New evidence has shown that the gut microbiome and its associated metabolites impact host athletic performance during endurance racing in humans 6,7 . The gut microbiome produces thousands of unique small molecules that can potentially affect many aspects of physiology such as regulating immunity, hydration and redox reactions as well as shaping the gut-brain axis that affects fatigue and stress perception 2, [8][9][10][11][12] . These metabolites can act locally in the intestine or can accumulate up to millimolar concentrations in different body fluids 13 .…”

Improving Horse Welfare and Environmental Sustainability in Horse Husbandry: Linkage between Turnout and Nitrogen Surplus

“…Brain analyses via electroencephalograms, assessment of intestinal microbiota composition, and behavior measurements revealed a positive influence of keeping horses at pasture on the physical and mental wellbeing, as opposed to single housing systems without pasture access [7,46]. These results seen in horses kept in confinement suggest that welfare may be compromised when horses are not provided with access to pasture.…”