The Horse's Advocate Podcast
by Geoff Tucker, DVM
The Horse's Advocate Podcast is about helping horse owners find the missing horse owner's manual for owning and caring for horses. Geoff Tucker, DVM (aka, "Doc T"), brings you wisdom from almost 50 years with horses. But beware - some of this stuff is NOT what you might expect. When the "box to think outside of" was built, he was never included and remained outside! This show aims to Help Horses Thrive In A Human World.
Episodes
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Do All Obese Horses Get Sick? - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #188
In this podcast, I explain why it's important for all of a horse's systems to stay flexible, especially when it comes to body fat. Many horse owners worry when their horses lose "weight" and assume it's a problem. I reassure them that, as long as the horse isn't starving or sick, this can…
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Equine Metabolic Syndrome Happens When Cell Engines Get Stuck - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #187
Like all animals, horses need energy to survive. That energy comes from fuel, which is why many health issues focus on what horses eat—grains, hay, supplements, and treats are all fuels we can see and buy. We often ignore how well a horse's cells turn fuel into energy, since we can't see the...
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What Are The Actual Costs of How We Feed Horses? The Horse's Advocate Podcast #186
Horse owners who are watching their budgets often focus on the cost of feeding each horse—hay, grain, supplements, and treats. But what about other expenses, like illness, less work, lost work, or even losing a horse too soon? These can lead to extra costs for vets, farriers, and other care. So,...
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Are Drugs And Machines Necessary To Float Horse Teeth? - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #185
Since 1983, I have seen horse dentistry shift from hand-floating, done without medication or machines, to a mechanical approach using sedation and motorized tools to remove sharp enamel edges. My main argument is that these newer procedures are not proven to achieve better outcomes, yet are often...
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How Does Energy Flow Make Your Horse Unhealthy? - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #184
In the last podcast (#183 - How Does Energy Flow Keep Your Horse Alive And Healthy?), the energy potential of the cell is its ability to perform all necessary functions, which was the product of supply (energy flow) and demand (energy resistance). The "sweet spot" for the supply and demand is...
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How Does Energy Flow Make Your Horse Alive And Healthy? The Horse's Advocate Podcast #183
Everything that happens in horses requires energy. Similarly, every household and business has a budget. When there is enough money, everything is good, and with our horses, if there is enough energy, the horses remain healthy and even thrive. This podcast looks at energy flow like a budget…
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How Helpful Are Vitamins and Supplements For Our Horses? - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #182
There are two ways to provide vitamins, minerals, and amino acids to your horse: through factories or nature. In this episode, I discuss how horses obtain these nutrients naturally and where natural sources fall short. I also explore the production of these nutrients in laboratories and…
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Marketing and the Funding Of Science - Reasons Why Horses Are More Sick, Not Less - #181 The Horse's Advocate Podcast
My mailbox and inbox get a never-ending stream of advertisements, all promising that my horse will become free of disease or super-athletic. Some boast scientific research backing their claims, while others have endorsements from winning contestants. All use the time-tested formula of identifying…
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What Can Horse Owners Do To Prevent The Top 3 Foal Complications? - #180 The Horse's Advocate Podcast
Foals are especially vulnerable in their first months of life. Think about the first time you met a newborn foal—did you know it takes both knowledge and experience to protect them well? In this podcast, we'll dive into three of the top challenges horse owners face with foals just after birth to…
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The Reason Why Horse Teeth Need To Be Filed (Floated) - #179 The Horse's Advocate Podcast
Filing off sharp edges inside a horse's mouth may seem a bit odd at first glance. If nature is perfect, you might wonder, why would horse teeth need this help? How did horses get by without floating, the process that smooths those sharp edges? These are thoughtful questions, and I explore…
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Can Ertugliflozin Save My Horse? - #178 The Horse's Advocate Podcast
Glucose is an essential sugar for horses, but too much of it can be harmful. While diet is your main tool for reducing glucose intake, what can you do when your horse still struggles with glucose and insulin control? And are there medications that can help lower blood glucose? Let's explore one...
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Glucose - The Mystery Of This Required Sugar - # 177 The Horse's Advocate Podcast
Glucose is one of many sugars. It is an essential nutrient for both horses and people. When talking about sugar in food, you might hear words like carbs, starch, fructose, lactose, saccharide, or others. But for now, let's just focus on glucose. Without it, our horses—and we—cannot survive. Yet...
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Am I Too Old To Teach The Young Horse Owner? #176 The Horse's Advocate Podcast
New horse owners join the community every day, from children to adults with little or no experience. Many expect horse ownership to be as simple as using everyday conveniences like microwaves or making phone calls. Yet, horses are fundamentally different. Unlike technology, which responds…
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Common Plant and Tree Toxins of Horses in North America - #175 The Horse's Advocate Podcast
Horses graze on grass and plants, not trees, because their digestive tracts—shared by equids, tapirs, and rhinoceroses—cannot digest wood. Unlike ruminants (cattle, deer, goats), they avoid lignin. When starving, however, horses may eat almost anything, which is why some plants and trees become...
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Why Science Isn't Helping Horses - #174 The Horse's Advocate Podcast
Science relies on asking questions, testing them, obtaining answers, and questioning those answers again. Scientists never settle; their curiosity drives them to consider all possibilities, regardless of prior beliefs. There is never a final answer—only answers that are close. This approach…
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Horses Are Not Robots - #173 The Horse's Advocate Podcast
NOTE: There is a section about 1 minute long where it sounds different because I inserted a video of me driving my hands-free car. To see it, please watch this on YouTube. We all know that horses are not robots. Robots are mechanisms that do not think; they simply execute programmed instructions....
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Sugar Fungus In Horse Feeds - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #172
The first time I heard the words "Sugar Fungus" used with horses, I thought it might be a new, and possibly harmful, reportable disease. I braced myself for the thought that another new disease was invading the world of horses, and that there may not be a cure. However, to my surprise, I learned...
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The Crisis in Veterinary Medicine Gets Worse - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #171
The April 2026 edition of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA Vol. 264, #4) caught my attention with 4 articles and an author's response to an article. In this podcast, I use the information gathered from them to suggest that many new veterinary graduates are a...
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Equine Metabolic Syndrome and Insulin Resistance Are NOT the Same - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #170
Equine Metabolic Syndrome (EMS) and Insulin Resistance (IR) are just words to most horse owners. We hear them, and we hope our horse doesn't "get them" attached to their health report. Even the veterinarians get a bit confused about how horses get started on the path of poor metabolic health....
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Cancer In Horses - Is Their Diet Helping? - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #169
Cancer is defined as normal cells of the body behaving badly, at least that's the simple explanation given by AI. It's more complex than that. Luckily, in horses, cancer is rare; three of the top five occur in the skin, where we can see them. Of the other two, one is in the ovaries and remains...
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Why Horse Supplements Are Only Guessing - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #168
My wife placed a supplement ad for horses in front of me and said it was "interesting." She knows me, so she was testing me to see if this one was really special or just another waste of money. Rather than give the same old response about marketing ploys to take money without substantiating the...
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Horse Problems Not In My 1984 Veterinary Textbooks - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #167
Cornell Veterinary School is well established as one of the best veterinary schools in the world, renowned for specialties like wildlife, infectious diseases, and equine practice. A quick search of data shows that Cornell's vet school was ranked #1 from 2000 (no data before this) until 2015....
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Why Do We Love Horses? The Gap Between Owner Care And Veterinary Care - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #166
Most advice from horse professionals focuses on solving problems using standard approaches, rather than looking for the root cause. For example, if you look at a chart of all causes of death in horses, dental issues barely register compared to colic, laminitis, or metabolic diseases. Many horse...
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If Food Doesn't Get Horses to Go Faster or Longer, Then What Does? - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #165
Horses have tiny engines within almost every cell of their bodies, and each of these runs on fuel that comes from the food they eat. These engines are called mitochondria. This podcast describes these engines and what happens to our horses when they stop working efficiently. One thing is for...
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Overcoming Fear - the Horse's Advocate Podcast #164
Having fear can cripple most people from enjoying life. Horse people suffer more than most from fear of horses because what they enjoy most in life are horses. This becomes a paradox that worsens their entire life. However, there are tangents to the fear horse owners have, such as the fear that...
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The TMJs Of Horses Are Not A Problem, But Our Thinking Of It Is - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #163
The temporomandibular (TM) joints in horses are evolutionary masterpieces that have evolved over 55 million years. But suddenly, the experts are saying that the joints are failing because the mouth has become "unbalanced." I disagree. The experts say that unridable horses have pain in the TM…
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What Is First Principles Thinking and How Does It Apply To Horses - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #162
First Principles Thinking involves examining complex problems in terms of their most fundamental and undeniable truths. Applying First Principles Thinking to everything we do with our horses to help them, and us, in every task, is what I have been doing for a while at The Horse's Advocate. Over...
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Is A Ketogenic Diet For Horses Possible? - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #161
The Ketogenic diet is popular for weight loss in humans, but does it work, and can it work with my grass-eating horses? The simple answer is yes, and you don't need to make them carnivores! A ketone, also known as beta-hydroxybutyrate, can be produced in two ways in horses. The first is the...
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Horse Care - Indoctrination Or Education - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #160
Indoctrinate is a verb defined by Apple's Dictionary as "teach (a person or group) to accept a set of beliefs uncritically." Apple's thesaurus offers these similar words: "BRAINWASH, propagandize, proselytize, inculcate, re-educate, persuade, convince, condition, discipline, mold; instruct…
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The Catabolic Crisis In Horses - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #159
Every day, all body proteins break down into the small building blocks of amino acids, sending these free molecules into a recycling program for use in building other proteins. Why this happens remains a mystery, as does the reason we don't lose our muscle shape or our memories during the…
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How Should Dentistry Be Performed In Horses? - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #157
The debate over horse dentistry needs to be resolved before it escalates into an all-out war, leaving horses without the dental care they need. The two main issues fueling this conflict—hand floating versus power equipment, and the debate over whether only veterinarians or non-veterinarians…
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The Spectrum Of Care In Horses - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #156
The model for training veterinarians is broken. Horse owners complain about the cost and the outcome of advanced procedures and diagnostics. Young veterinary graduates quickly become disillusioned, experience declining morale, and elect to leave the profession. The veterinary crisis is real and…
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A New Way To See Horses In 2026 - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #155
As science advances, new ideas about our existence develop that challenge our beliefs. As 2026 begins, more and more credible scientists, with irrefutable credentials, are now willing to address ideas that, only a few years ago, would have been dismissed. Luckily, those of you who have been...
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Smoke And Mirrors In The Horse World - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #154
The information about care for our horses is overwhelming and often conflicting. The reason is simple: accurate science with horses is impossible due to the expense. The rule for scientific study follows a simple roadmap. First, suggest a hypothesis, which is a supposition based on observation…
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Drama In The Horse World - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #153
More dramatic stories from horse people about how tooth extractions were recommended by veterinarians, with one causing weight loss and permanent diet changes, and the other averted by a second opinion. What was common to both stories was that no horse had a chewing, eating, or weight problem...
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An Evening With Dr. Belden - A Thanksgiving Holiday Tradition - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #152
I remember when I started my veterinary career: someone told me that, although I was skilled and had just graduated from vet school, the older local veterinarian had more experience. I responded that just because he was old doesn't mean he was aware of the new techniques and knowledge I had just...
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Technology - Just Because We Can, Should We?- The Horse's Advocate Podcast #151
I will be a member of a roundtable discussion on equine dentistry in December, along with a dozen or so other equine dentists. The goal, according to the manager of this discussion, is to table everyone's ideas and to hear everyone's opinion. We have all been asked not to denigrate contributors...
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Siloed Horse Information Doesn't Help Horses - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #150
I have returned to podcasting after a 7-month hiatus. There are two reasons: I have been working on a new place where all horse owners can find unbiased, safe, private, and convenient information about their horses. Go to Community.TheHorsesAdvocate.com to see how easy it is to get the…
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The Key To Reducing Excess Body Fat In Horses - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #149
There are two reasons for horses to become obese. The first reason is that they eat more calories daily than they use. The intake of calories is in the form of excess starch from hay and grains and excess fat from the digestion of cellulose in the hindgut. The second reason is often…
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Attracting Good Horse Veterinarians - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #148
In South Dakota, the legislature is working on a bill making it legal for non-veterinarians to float horses' teeth by hand or with power and possibly using sedation. The same is happening in Oregon, with the addition of non-vets pregnancy-checking livestock. In Colorado, a mid-level veterinary...
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Confidence Versus Arrogance In Horses - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #147
Uncertain people do uncertain things. This uncertainty affects everything, including people and horses, and not necessarily in good ways. Most people have addressed the quest to conquer their inner self, but few become successful. Our horses know this. This podcast looks at the essence of all...
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To Fix The Hoof, You Need To Feed The Hoof - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #146
Horse hooves can experience various problems that farriers and veterinarians work to address with their specialized skills and equipment. These issues include crushed heels, splayed walls, cracked walls, dropped soles, bruised soles, and sole abscesses. However, in every conference I attend…
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Constant Hunger In Horses - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #145
Two factors drive food aggression in horses. The first factor is the foraging behavior created by converting fructose into uric acid. The purpose of fructose is to prepare horses for the upcoming winter. However, not only is it fed throughout the year, but the high-sugar foods being fed cause...
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Should We Listen To Horse Education? - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #144
Who do you believe? Is it the person with credentials or the person with experience? Maybe neither, because whenever anyone says something, there is an agenda. The need to talk is to communicate with someone to gain a response. Here are examples: "What is your name?" is a question wanting an...
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The Science Behind The Connection With Horses. An Interview With Dr. Maria Katsamanis - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #143
Dr. Maria Katsamanis (Dr. Maria) joins me on this podcast to discuss how science can help us create better connections with our horses. I do these things every day, but I need the science or research behind why I do what I do. She delivers on this and more! Dr. Maria will be delighted if you…
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Dr Belden Returns For Our Annual Thanksgiving Interview - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #142
This podcast is a special Rounds With Doc T with my friend and colleague, Dr James Belden. Usually, Rounds are for members of The Horse's Advocate, but as an annual Thanksgiving treat, it is available for everyone to watch or listen to. Dr Belden graduated from Cornell's veterinary school in…
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The Crisis In Veterinary Medicine Worsens - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #141
Three articles from the AVMA arrived in my inbox this week: Gap shrinks between new graduate, overall veterinary salaries Midlevel practitioner proposal secures enough votes in Colorado Federal appeals court reverses Texas VCPR ruling These articles drove me to make this podcast, the third in a...
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Integrity In Veterinary Medicine - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #140
Forgive me as I rant about veterinary care. This week, I experienced or heard of four events between veterinarians and their owners that have me asking: Are the schools teaching integrity along with veterinary medicine? There are 13 new vet schools in America, spawning 55,000 more veterinarians…
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More New Vets But Less Horse Vets - The Horse's Advocate Podcast #139
Over the next ten years, thirteen new vet schools will be built and accredited by the AVMA to teach and add 55,000 more veterinarians to the existing veterinary colleges and new veterinary graduates. The expansion of the profession is driven by the growth of corporate-owned veterinary clinics and...
About this show
The Horse's Advocate Podcast is about helping horse owners find the missing horse owner's manual for owning and caring for horses. Geoff Tucker, DVM (aka, "Doc T"), brings you wisdom from almost 50 years with horses. But beware - some of this stuff is NOT what you might expect. When the "box to think outside of" was built, he was never included and remained outside! This show aims to Help Horses Thrive In A Human World.
Hosted by
Geoff Tucker, DVM