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The Horse's digestive system
You can find more about horses here


Skeleton of a horse

A = Stomach
B = Small intestines
C = Caecum
D = Colon ascendens
E = Colon descendens
F = Rectum

How the Digestive System Works
Your horse is a grass-eating machine! He has evolved over millions of years to survive on a diet of nothing but grass and although he is adaptable and can eat grain and hay when we need him to, his digestive system is designed as and will always work best as a perfectly oiled grass processing system. A horse’s intestine is long and can become tangled easily > Equine colic

The sections of this system;
1. The mouth and teeth: where food is chewed and ground into small pieces. The tongue manoeuvres the food to the back of the mouth to the pharynx (throat), where it enters the oesophagus (gullet) and is swept down the dilated tube by swift peristaltic waves.
2. The food reaches the stomach, which is small and 'J' shaped. Here digestive juices (acids and enzymes) are added and the mixture starts to be broken down. It then passes on to ...
3. Small intestine (21-25 meters in lenght) in which protein splitting enzymes are added to reduce the protein to amino acids which the colon can absorb. Most parts of the food are here digested and absorbed into the blood. Hay, grass stems and other fibrous roughage are passed on into the ...
4. Caecum, which is a blind sac (about 1 meter), the bacteria here breaks down the cellulose and converts it into fatty acids, which are absorbed and passed to the liver. Here they are converted into glucose for immediate use or stored for use later.
5. The remaining substance is passed from the ceacum into the large colon, where more bacterial action takes place. Nutrients are passed through the colon wall into the blood stream. Large and small colon are the large intestines: 7-9 meters long
6. The small colon is where further nutrients and water are extracted and the waste passes to the...
7. Rectum, where the waste material is formed into balls of dung to be passed out through the anus at frequents intervals.

Horses are designed to eat grass, and the more natural roughage we can feed, the better the digestive health of the horse will be and the less likely you are to see problems like colic or laminitis.

Here you can see the skeleton of a horse
Here you can see the skeleton of a dog
Here you can see an X-ray of a cat