Podcast #72
Bentley had been a healthy horse for years, until an injury, prolonged antibiotic treatment and a cascade of gut problems changed everything. Persistent colic, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, gastric ulcers and gas eventually led us to look more closely at his hindgut microbiome.
In this episode, Dr Nerida shares Bentley’s roller-coaster ride case study, from microbiome testing and low microbial diversity, through increasing dietary fibre diversity and two faecal microbiota transplants (FMT), to the gradual return of a comfortable, happy horse. We also look at free faecal water, faecal pH, vitamin B2, fibre-fermenting bacteria and what Bentley’s before-and-after microbiome results might tell us about equine dysbiosis, gut health and colic risk.
It’s a brilliant example of just how complex the horse hindgut is, and how much we still have to learn about rebuilding a disrupted microbiome. Have a listen and be sure to hang on for the highs and the lows of Bentley’s story ❤️
Big thanks to Bentley's beautiful owner Saskia for allowing us to their incredible story! 🙏🏼🥰
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72. When a Horse’s Gut Health Goes Wrong: Bentley’s Story[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:58:07
G'day, g'day, and welcome to the Happy Horse Nutrition Podcast. I'm Dr Nerida, professional equine nutritionist, horse lover, and someone who feels like they've never worked a day in their life, because I love my job as an equine nutritionist so much. And one of the things that gives me the greatest joy in my work is watching a horse who comes out of a.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:58:25
pretty tough situation and manages to bounce back to their normal happy selves. So today in this podcast, something that I haven't done yet on the entire, all of this, all of the podcast episodes, we haven't done this yet, but I'm going to do a case study and look at the story of Bentley. So Bentley is a horse who lives with his beautiful owner. Bentley's so blessed to have an owner as committed as he has to him in Tasmania, so south of Hobart. For anyone not familiar with Tasmania in the rest of the world, it's the funny little island, sorry Tas.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:58:49
it can be quite dry, but it can also be very lush. Lots of lush green grass, um, during, you know, major periods, like, extended periods of time throughout the year. So it is a… I find Tasmania a relatively challenging environment to keep horses in. But Bentley had been there for a number of years, and… and in fact, his owner had him for 9 years before the trouble we are going to cover today began. And B.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:59:07
with persistent pain, persistent colic, bad diarrhoea. He had lots of things going on in his gut, and he wasn't a happy horse, so it was a big welfare issue, and for all of us who own horses, we all feel, I think, our horses when they're unwell, and it's a really tough situation to be in when you've got a horse that you know has been unwell for an extended period of time.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:59:27
And she found us through the My Happy Horse Nutrition app website and was asking, you know, can we help with Bentley? And I said, yes, of course we can, I'd love to help, and was asking whether getting a microbiome analysis would help. And we did ultimately get a microbiome analysis done, and it absolutely did help, and it's got us to the point now where I just checked in with Saskia this morning to make sure that, you know, Bentley was still doing well before I went and told his story on the podcast, and she said he's doing well. So overall, he looks great. So this is from the email this morning. Overall, he looks great and he's so much happier. So he has.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 13:59:54
So Bentley's troubles started in 2024, so February 2024. He got himself stuck in a dam, and he was properly stuck, um, and the vet who treated him at that point in time was worried that he had aspirated or sucking water into his lungs, and so they gave him a course of sulprim antibiotics, so an infeed antibiotic, back in 2024. We're piecing it together from email.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:00:14
contacted me, and she asked then, you know, do you think I should get a microbiome analysis done? And it's not an immediate yes for me. So, I mean, microbiome analyses are amazing, and the first time I experienced them, I described it as feeling like horses could finally talk to me. But sometimes, you know, we can try things or do things with a hor.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:00:28
Bentley's history and interestingly or you know the thing that stood out to me was that he'd had this mishap with the dam and then he'd had a pretty extended course of antibiotics. He was a really good candidate for microbiome analysis and he also had so many symptoms going on in his gut. So Saskia said it was February 2024 when he got stuck in the dam. Then he had a bout of laminitis in November 2024 and then he crashed with colic in June 2025. And then after the colic he had what Saskia describes as shocking grade 4 pyloric ulcers and a few low grade squamous ulcers and she thinks that it.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:00:58
massive colic episode in June 2025. So his gut from start to finish was pretty unhealthy. And something I need to constantly remind myself and also keep mentioning so that we all remember is the gut, even though we talk about it in very distinct sections, so you know, we talk about the stomach and its roles and the small intestine and its roles and the hindgut and what it does.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:01:14
We have to remember that all of these bits of the gastrointestinal tract are all attached, they're all stuck together. If one part of the gastrointestinal tract is very inflamed or unhealthy for some reason, it does stand to reason that there is going to be at least some flow-on effect to other parts of the gastrointestinal tract, because.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:01:29
identified at this point in time, and he stayed on ulcer treatment at that time for 5 months, and as Saskia says, it really should have gone on so long. Dr. Ben Sykes ended up diagnosing that he actually had a polyp in his stomach, so there was complications amongst complications in there. He had been on omeprazole for 5 months, and then he was also on sucralfate when I came into the picture. So.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:01:46
When I sort of came into the picture, he was just constantly colicking and gassy and uncomfortable. So we talked about what happened first. I've got the timeline here printed out. I've got notes upon notes here, but it's actually, it's hard to remember in my head what came first. But I've got here 30th of December, referred Saskia to the E.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:02:02
We had his hindgut tested. When it came back, it was like, okay, some of what's going on here seems to be making sense. So if I pull up his microbiome reports, which I've got right here in amongst the 700 other files that I've got open at the same time, what stood out the most in his microbiome report? So remember that we're all pretty new at reading these things, and so we don't, you know, there's a long list of the top 30 most common bacteria in his sample. But what stands out immediately is that if you look at his species richness, so that is the number of individual species of bacteria that were in his manure and indicative of.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:02:30
species richness number that equity I use is 359 individual bacterial species. So that was from a healthy population of wild foraging horses. They found 359 individual species. Bentley only had 271. If you go back and have a listen to the podcast about Allay and her first 12 months off the track, that species richness of 270 is getting on the low side. He has lost species richness. And this is what I love about nutrition. And this is what I love about having tools like microbiome analysis is you can start to put the puzzle pieces together. So it made perfect sense to me that with his.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:02:55
Antibiotic treatment after being stuck in the dam, which really was the point in time he'd been a healthy horse for 9 years leading up to that point in time. He'd never had any, he'd not had antibiotics during the time that Saskia had owned him, so he'd been perfectly normal, perfectly healthy up until that point in time. Then he got stuck in the dam, he had the antibiotic treatment, and then he had this long cascade of the colics and the ulcers and various other health problems that he had going on. So when you see this low species richness in his hindgut, I started to go, okay, this is.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:03:21
And when I look at the top 30 species of bacteria that are living in his gut, what's also obvious is that there are a couple of bacteria that are really dominant. So Aristaeola lactis and Mediterranean, it's like a game to say all these names, Mediterranean bacterinatis are the two most dominant. And then there's another Aristaeola, Hokkaido, Hokkaidonensis. So.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:03:41
But I think the loss of species richness, and then this uneven distribution. So the distribution gets measured in two measures. There's the Shannon Diversity Index, which Belinda will be really proud of me for remembering this. So Shannon Diversity combines both the number of microbes and also how evenly they are distributed. It goes from, I don't know, I've.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:03:57
I think, would be what is considered perfect. It goes up to 5. So the wild foraging horses had an average of 4.92 for their Shannon diversity, and Bentley was sitting at 4.37, so definitely lower. And Hilo's evenness for the wild foraging horses is sitting at 0.84, and Bentley was sitting at 0.78. So the Shannon diversity is reflecting that there's both a loss of number of species and also this uneven distribution. So there was some bacteria that were actually more dominant than.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:04:20
hindgut microbes is that there was another horse that was local to me named Sunday. She also had diarrhoea. No antibiotic history, though, for her, but she had diarrhoea. And when I compared the top 30 microbes in Bentley's hindgut to the top 30 microbes in Sunday's hindgut, they shared 20 of the top 30. That is significant. And they were ranked in a similar way as well. So the Mediterranean bacteria, and I have no idea if I'm saying that properly, so just ignore my pronunciations of all these bacteria. But it was really dominant.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:04:48
And so, we're still learning as scientists and as nutritionists what the patterns are for different horses and for different conditions. We knew from his microbiome analysis that he had lost faeces richness, and it goes hand-in-hand with the treatment of antibiotics back in 2024. And so, I said to Saskia, I think Bentley is a candidate for a faecal microbiome transplant. So, taking faeces from a healthy donor horse and nasogast.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:05:07
Bentley's gut to help him re-establish his hindgut microbes, because you've got to remember, he was stuck in the dam in February 2024. I hope I'm getting all these dates right, I'll just go back and check that. Yeah, so he was stuck in the dam in February 2024, and then he colicked severely in June 2025, so it's more than a year.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:05:25
going to reestablish his microbes by himself. Often horses can, and Allay was a really good demonstration of that. You know, we brought her out of racing and did a microbiome analysis on day one when we had her, and then we tracked her over the first 10 months of being off the track, and she did just naturally increase her microbial species. But it looks like Bentley, for whatever reason, and you know, we're never going to know, you know, was it because of the length of time he was on the antibiotic, or the dose of the antibiotic.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:05:48
struggling with all sorts of health conditions, and it just wasn't able to re-establish itself properly. So I said to Saskia, I think Bentley is a really good candidate for fecal microbiome transplant, but if we wanted the new microbes to stick around, we had to make sure that we gave them a varied enough food source to feed them all. So it wasn't… I felt like, and this is me essentially making this up as I go along, I felt like if we just took the microbiome from.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:06:09
that were in Bentley's gut, that we weren't going to get anywhere. And maybe we would have, because, you know, it's N equals 1, so we couldn't have, you know, Bentley A and Bentley B and, you know, not change the diet for one and change the diet for the other and see if it made a difference, but… and we will never know whether, you know, could we have just put more fibre sources.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:06:26
that I'm always so grateful to have. It's got many, many different species that the horse will eat, you know, so he did the bulk of the work for me, but I had also used, you know, lupin holes and copper meal and sugar beet pulp and, um, lucerne, and we added lots of fibers into Alay's diet, and we were.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:06:42
Bacteria in his hindgut, but he could have been missing just a couple of really key ones that were needed to maintain the integrity of his hindgut wall or produce some compound that he needed to function normally in his hindgut. We don't know enough about the who's who of the hindgut yet or of their function in the hindgut and function in the hindgut ecosystem. We didn't know of the ones that he was missing, we didn't know who was missing and what their roles might have been, and our best shot of finding them and giving them back to Bentley is to go and take them away from.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:07:06
We didn't have that luxury of doing that, so instead we took Bentley's buddy, who was very healthy, was very healthy when you were a no colic, and we used him as the donor. But before we did, as I said, I wanted to change the diet, and something really interesting, and I have to be honest here, really scary things started to happen when we increased the fibre diversity. So poor Bentley, and I have so much admiration for you, Saskia, and I know you'll be listening to this, so I truly had so much admiration for you as we were going through this process, because.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:07:31
He got worse and quite significantly worse. So we had the first microbiome report at the end of January this year in 2026. And once we had reviewed the report and we decided that yes, let's increase fibre diversity and then go for a faecal microbiome transplant. In February, early February, Assasia started to introduce, slowly introduce some alternative fibres. So we had things like beet bulb and lubins. There was some mash in there, some copper meal, some teff and lucent cubes.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:07:53
And it's tested low NSA, because we didn't want to put too much non-structural carbohydrate, and certainly not too much fructan in there, because I didn't want to encourage the starch fermenting microbes, I wanted to encourage the fiber fermenting microbes. So we were looking for fiber sources that were low non-structural carbohydrate, but high in fiber. And after introducing some.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:08:12
And Bentley did get so much more worse, so much more worse, so much worse. And I'm just trying to really emphasise the point there. But he was gassy, he ended up with frequent water, and he'd had diarrhoea, so nothing changed there. He was tail swishing a lot, he was kicking at his belly, he was continually sort of biting and scratching at his sides. And he became so painful by mid-February that.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:08:32
And I said, well, if you can hold your nerve, and if you can keep him comfortable, if you can control his pain, adjust the diet, but try not to take everything out. And at the same time, you probably don't want to know this, but at the same time, I was questioning myself, going, oh, are we doing the right thing here? I don't really know if we're doing the right thing here, because you don't get to do this thing twice with a horse. You kind of just have to figure.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:08:51
Walls through pain to get them better. It's not a nice feeling, and so, you know, lucky I wasn't there being the one that was actually feeding him, because I don't know whether I would have been able to hold, I was having trouble holding my nerve as the nutritionist, alone being as the one that was actually feeding him. So, he did get really painful. We managed to control his pain. One of the things that had happened was the super locks had been taken out, and we thought, well, let's put that back in, because it co.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:09:12
this year, and we'd always planned to do two, so we went, let's do two four or five days apart, and when the vet came out to do the first faecal microbiome transplant, unfortunately, it wasn't very well set up to actually achieve what we wanted to achieve, and the equipment that they had was getting blocked, and so they got a little bit of the microbiome transplant into him, but.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:09:30
transplant material into him. And it was really interesting, because immediately after the faecal microbiome transplants, he would get a little bit better. But then he would seem to regress again. And so again, you know, here's me thinking, you know, I just, you know, wasted all this time and money for people in recommending they do something that's not actually going to help. And I wasn't sharing all.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:09:45
We'd gotten enough new microbes into his gut to do something, but also recognizing, remember, fibre fermenting microbes take ages to reproduce. So they, and it sounds funny saying that because, you know, what's the gestation is 9, 10 months, 40 weeks, and an elephant takes 2 years, like that's ages to reproduce. And, but in bacterial terms, the fibre fermenting microbes take a long time. So it's about 18 hours they need to double their population. So if you have 1, after 18 hours you have 2, and then after another 18 hours you have 4, and, you know, so on. So it takes a long time for them to build up their pop.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:10:13
Certainly, every 2 h they will double their population. So you start to do the maths on them. And you know, there's gazillions making up stupid numbers. But there are so many of them. If you feed them, they will explode their population and take over the hindgut. So remember that we were trying to introduce here fibre-feeding microbes, and we were feeding them fibre. So I was really hopeful that I was right. And it's fun to tell the story with the benefit of hindsight, because the story has a happy ending.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:10:35
improvement, because we'd given him the microbes from another horse, but then you'd sort of see this bit of a regression as those microbes then went, oh, hang on a minute, this is a completely new environment here, and they had to kind of sort themselves out and establish themselves properly in Bentley's hindgut. He still had, after his bacon microbiome transplants, he still had some obvious discom.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:10:53
Sikkim sits down along the right side of their abdomen, and he appeared miserable, and I was feeling a little bit unhappy at this point in time. I would have hoped that he was feeling and seeming a little bit better. He kept eating, which was great. And then by late February, he was really gassy. So Saskia said he's doing trumpet farts. But from what I remember, he hadn't been farting this whole time, like prior to having the faecal microbiome transplant. He was gassy and colicky, but he wasn't farting. So at least the gas was coming out. But he was also at that.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:11:19
this was a good thing. It felt like maybe we were getting somewhere. And then by the 9th of March, so a couple of weeks after his first faecal microbiome transplant, he was obviously improved and off pain relief. I'm like, oh, that was a really happy moment when we finally got this horse off pain relief. And he was described at that point in time as being less gassy.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:11:35
fecal water, so he… it had been just normal diarrhea previously, and interestingly, it started going more towards free fecal water, so formed manure, but a running fraction that was coming out with the manure. Another interesting change was that he… Saskia had measured his fecal pH prior to any of the changes we made, and it was 8.5, so it's quite alkaline, which is… it's not unheard of, but it.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:11:53
sorry, fecal pH is at 8.5. It says to me that there's not a lot going on in the hindgut. And in fact, he was a good doer. And in the email this morning, Saskia says he has returned to being a good doer. And I feel like I almost need to apologize for that because, you know, good doers are so hard to manage. But it shows you that in that period of time when he was unwell, he was, he'd become not a hard keeper, but he was not a good doer like he had been previously. And it.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:12:15
fibre. And it's those volatile fatty acids that a horse then absorbs and uses as a source of energy. And for horses that are on just fibre diets, which is what Bentley was on in the lead up to all of this, his diet was good news. It was pasture and hay, and it wasn't like he had gut problems because he was being fed a lot of grain or raw grain or anything like that. He was on a fibre-based diet. But that high pH would indicate that he didn't have the microb.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:12:38
back down to 7, which is neutral, and that is what I would consider to be far more normal for a horse on a fiber-based diet. And it also said to me that there was more going on in his hindgut, so, you know, I took from that that maybe we did achieve something here, maybe we have got a lot more microbes in there, and they are fermenting fiber a lot more and producing a lot more.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:12:54
Pretty standard fibre-based diet, albeit with as much fibre diversity as we could keep in his diet as possible. So it wasn't smooth sailing from this point, so he was definitely better, but there was some concern about the pasture that he was on. So there was perennial ryegrass, and if you listen to the podcast, it's the one that's out this week. You'd think I'd be able to remember the number of it as I record this, but I'm madly trying to find it on my phone. So episode 70 is perennial ryegrass changing your horse's behaviour. We go into a lot of detail in that podcast, and if you've got perennial ryegrass.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:13:24
was concerned about the ryegrass, and so put a toxin binder into his diet, and it sent him backwards. It was a yeast cell wall-based toxin binder, and he became irritable again. He was scratching his sides and kicking and tail-swishing, and he was gassy again, and he was back on pain relief.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:13:39
He went back to what had become his more normal state, so off pain medication. It highlighted a couple of things. One, his gut was still so sensitive, so that one little change really set him off. And, you know, I might have gone back when I was a much younger nutritionist, like, no, it couldn't be that, like, it's such a tiny amount of something, like, there's no way that that would upset his hindgut. You've got to remember that this horse's hindgut has been upset for years, and it's only just starting to find its feet and only just starting to stabilize a little bit, so it didn't take very much to knock it back out of balance and start to cause pain and problems for Bentley again.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:14:09
and a little bit of intermittent discomfort, but he was described by his owner as being dramatically better than before. And we deliberately continued to try and increase the fiber diversity in his diet because even though we attempted to introduce new bacterial species, we still wanted to use the diet to diversify his hunger microbiome as much as possible. So.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:14:24
You allow different bacteria and fungi, but we weren't testing the fungi in this case, but you allow the microbes to find their favourite food sources and set up their little niches. So, you know, there's some microbes that love mannans, which are, you know, one of the predominant fibres in copper meal, and some microbes that love pectins, which are one of the dominant fibres in sugar beet pulp. So when you put in all of these different fibre sources, you're favouring different microbes, and the point being you're wanting to get as much microbial diversity into the diet as possible. So.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:14:53
we definitely were wanting to maintain as much biodiversity into his diet as possible. Um, so jumping forward into mid-April, he was described as being comfortable and content, but interestingly, this faecal water, um, free faecal water syndrome had remained. So the pain and all those, um, sort of colicky symptoms had resolved, but he had persistent faecal water, but was otherwise happy and relaxed. So he was a different horse to what he was when we started working with him, and.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:15:13
health issues was getting back to his happy self. And there was one funny email there where I was like, "Well, that's great, but that's also really not good," where Bentley and his paddock mate had actually gotten into mischief and had kicked someone, not Bentley, his paddock mate, but they'd been mucking around and racing around like crazy things. And someone ended up getting kicked in amongst all of that. It was funny, not funny, because Zasky was saying, "Well, he's back to his normal, techy self." And so.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:15:36
I was at a horse event with 2 friends who are both human dietitians, which I absolutely love because we have the coolest conversations, and we're sitting at dinner and Ronnie was saying that she'd been reading this paper about humans and using big doses of vitamin B2 to actually stimulate microbes in the human gut to produce more butyrate. And butyrate is one of the volatile fatty acids that the horse's hindgut microbes produce. So they'll make acetate, which goes directly as a source of muscle energy. They make propionate, which is absorbed and used as energy, but it goes to the liver and gets converted to gl.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:16:03
The microbial spaces in our gut and also in our horse's gut produce butyrate. And what this paper was showing was if you sort of hyperdosed a human with vitamin B2, some particular microbes in their gut were increasing the production of butyrate. Well, I didn't sleep that night, not much, because I was thinking, oh, really, I really wanted to just get the paper and read it. And I was like, no, Nerida, that's taking this too far. You can't be awake in the middle of the night reading journal papers, which I do sometimes when I can.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:16:27
I wonder if that would work for Bentley with this very thick water, and B2 is a water-soluble vitamin, so it's safe. It's got a really, really high, well, I don't think it even has a toxicity threshold because it is water-soluble. Vitamin B6 is a different thing, and I'm going to mention here because it caught me out and I'm a nutritionist and should have known better, but if anyone's taking a magnesium supplement and it has got vitamin B6 in it, be really, really careful because B6, even though it is also.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:16:52
A bit of research and some news reports on basically an epidemic of vitamin B6 toxicity from human magnesium supplements. But I just thought I'd throw that in there because it caught me out and it was not like if it goes on for too long, you can do permanent damage to yourself. So do check your magnesium supplements and I would recommend taking one that doesn't have B6 in it because crazy amounts of B6. I don't know why they're formulated that way, but back to Bentley and vitamin B2, B2 won't get toxic like that. So there's potential upside with virtually no downside other than spending a bit of money on vitamin B2 and seeing no result. So I said to S.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:17:22
after introducing B2 and felt that it had made the biggest difference to resolving that symptom and describing him as being back to his old self. So this was in early July. So by that stage, his pain had resolved, his recurrent colic had disappeared, his renewal was back to normal, and his normal personality had returned, which was such a cool thing. Hey, quick pause. You know what causes hormones the most? It's not buying the wrong supplement. It's spending years second-guessing.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:17:43
That's the thing I built My Happy Horse to fix. It helps you create clear, personalised nutrition plans for your horse, based on actual science, so you can stop doubting and start trusting yourself again. Find it at myhappy.h.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:17:53
To sort of wrap the story up, we got a second microbiome analysis done because, you know, it was all, it was great seeing from the outside that, you know, this horse was happier and healthier. And so we got a second microbiome report done. And initially when we looked at the report, it was a little bit deflating. It was like, oh, did we actually manage to achieve anything? It was a little bit def.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:18:09
We still had Aristaeola lactis and Mediterranean bacterinavis. So the two who were dominating in his first profile, they're still there and they're still dominant. Now the Mediterranean bacterinavis is maybe a little bit less dominant, but it's still dominant. And in fact, the fourth most, so we've still got Haecodonensis. So these names, I know it's crazy reading them out to you because it's so hard to match them up. But the third most dominant one, here I am flicking back and.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:18:33
tunnel vision, but, um, so yeah, so the Aristalolachus is still the most dominant, and then the Mediterranean Bactonavus, um, is the second most dominant, but it is reduced from the previous sample. Third most prevalent on his first sample was Aristalolachitinensis, and it is still in third position, but probably half the population it was before. And then the, um, Simioasuni, like I said.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:18:52
sort of keep going up, and you can see, you can see there's another bacteria there that very clearly halves in population, so we have definitely shifted his hindgut, and there is more grey space at the top of the, the top of the, um, the bars that I'm looking at, and the grey space is all of the other microbes, so we did shift the hindgut.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:19:08
It was disappointing, and Saskia and I were both a bit disappointed, thinking that we hadn't really done too much. However, when I scrolled down and got to the species richness in Bentley's hindgut, so the number of individual microbes, the number of individual bacteria that were living in his hindgut, he started at 271, and at the point in time where, so.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:19:25
And the wild foraging horses were, um, tested at 359. So he'd had more than a 20% increase in the number of species in his hindgut. And that…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:19:34
So we definitely did increase the number of bacteria in his hindgut, and it would have been partly from the fecal microbiome transplant, and it may just have partly happened naturally if we let it happen naturally by itself by adding the different fibres to his diet. But we have to remember, when we added those fibres to his diet, we made him worse, and I have no idea how long we would have had to fight through with Bentley being on maximum doses of paracetamol twice a day just to keep him comfortable enough to handle what he was eating. So the microbiome transplant seemed to speed up the process, so he got more.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:20:00
It wasn't a smooth road but a reasonably consistent road to getting better over that time, and we could see the increase in species richness. The Shannon Diversity Index did come up as well, so it jumped from 4.38 up to 4.48, and the Pilo's Evenness Index, so the one that just tells us how evenly distributed they are, it stayed about the same. It dropped by 0.01, so 0.78, and it was down to 0.77, so it was unchanged. And you can see that when you look at the individual species, there are still bacteria that are dominating his hindgut. Hopefully over time, and it'll be fascinating to do another microbi.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:20:29
we had quite big shifts in a number of species, but we also had quite big shifts in the evenness of the species in her hindgut. And I'm hopeful that with Bentley that.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:20:37
He did have, in his initial microbiome report, and this was something that we saw retrospectively, so the EquiGI technology had changed enough that they could actually report on these after the fact for the first sample that we'd done on Bentley, but he actually had some detectable E. coli and another bacteria that's got a crazy name, like Enterobacter…
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:20:52
I don't even want to try and say it, HormHI or something, I don't know, it's a long name. I don't know who names these things, but we found both of those in his gut on the first sample, and then neither of them were detected in the second sample, and Quantul and Belinda actually note that the enterobacter, so the one that's got the crazy name I can't say, can increase following broad-spectrum antimicrobial treatment and during equine colitis. So maybe they were involved.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:21:14
And we're never going to be able to say exactly what caused Bentley's issues in the first place, other than we do know with a fair degree of certainty that horses that have got reduced microbial diversity are at a high risk of colic. Their hindgut is much less stable. So there is quite a lot of research around that, showing that when you lose microbial diversity you also lose hindgut stability, and it takes very little to knock an unstable hindgut into dysbiosis and colic. And I think that is what we were seeing with Bentley, and it was conf.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:21:37
So in August of this year, Saskia reported that Bentley was back to being a good doer, which is great, and that his clinical symptoms were dramatically better, and yeah, it all kind of lined up with what we saw in that second microbiome analysis, and I really was so happy to read today in Saskia's email saying overall he looks great and is so.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:21:53
That's Bentley's story. It was a bit of an epic, and truly, like Saskia, you just did the most amazing job with Master Bentley. He really is so lucky to have you, and I feel very fortunate to be able to work with horse owners like you, because I get to learn so much along the way, and in fact, I think we had a bit of a laugh early on in this whole process, saying, you know.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:22:10
And it's true, you know, I'm lucky because I get to learn all these things through lots of other people, so I do feel very grateful for that. And yes, we will definitely stay in touch with you and get some Bentley updates through the coming months and years, but yeah, I'm just so happy that Bentley is back to being a happy horse, and yeah, hopefully you get to do many a fun thing with Bentley now that.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:22:26
I hope you've enjoyed your Bentley story. I hope, um, sorry, I hope everyone else has enjoyed the Bentley story. I'm pretty sure you didn't really enjoy it, Saskia. Um, but I hope there is something for a lot of you to take away from in listening to Bentley's story, and yeah, it just goes to show there's so much we still don't know about horses and horse nutrition. We've got so.
[Nerida McGilchrist] 14:22:47
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