What You Didn't Know about Horse Supplements

By Jennifer Gilliland, Mojo Joint

Jennifer Gilliland riding

We all have the best intentions getting our horses, who are our show partners, confidants, family members, tail buddies and in many cases psychologists, a great supplement. We want them to be comfortable doing whatever it is that we ask of them, but not all supplements are effective. Unlike medication, supplements are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. So you have to take the manufacturer's word that what is on the label is what is in the product you are feeding your horse.

Here is the real kicker though: even if you see an ingredient like Biotin on the label (for example) at 20 mg a day, the manufacturer does not have to tell you how strong that Biotin is. They can use the 99% or the 1%. The reason I know this is because I'm a founder of Mojo Joint, a manufacturer of horse supplements. So let's say you are trying to buy the supplement with more Biotin. You pick up the product that says it has 40 mg a day for your horse AND it happens to be cheaper than the 20 mg/ day product. "Oh, happy day!" you say.

Well, not so fast. The more expensive product with 20 mg a day may very well have 20 mg of Biotin in it, if they use the 99% concentration of Biotin. And the cheaper product you just picked up that says it supplies 40 mg a day actually has closer to 4 mg if they use the 1% Biotin. 4 mg a day is not enough to do anything other than give you warm fuzzies for buying what you believed to be the better supplement.

The manufacturer can spend $9,000 on a kilo of 99% Biotin (kilo=2.2 lbs) or they can spend $900 on a kilo of 1% Biotin, and in both cases can put 20 mg on the label and charge you the same amount. So why would they buy the more expensive ingredients, especially when they are competing against companies that are going to use the cheaper stuff and price themselves out of the market?

Oral supplements absolutely do work when the ingredients are strong enough and of quality concentrations. We started Mojo Joint because we have our own horses, and when working for a different product started to learn all the ins and outs of this market. When consulting with the nutritionist for this product she asked what our goals were for Mojo and I took pause at what I thought was an unusual question before answering that we wanted it to work.

That was followed by a pause on her end, then laughter, and she said in 30 years in her business that was the first time she had ever heard that. That should probably make you take pause. We didn't design this product with the sole goal of making a living. We have competition horses and were tired of feeding every horse different concoctions and trying to explain all these combinations to grooms when the horses were on the road.

There was a real need for a product that actually delivered on what it said it was going to do, and was in balanced amounts so our horses were not getting too much of some ingredients and not enough of others. We wanted something that would work on all of them so we did not have to feed 10 horses 10 different things.

After making Mojo we did not sell or advertise the product for at least a year. It was only fed to our own horses, because I wanted to make sure it delivered the results we said it did and was safe for long term use. We got one of our Hunter competition horses, Legs, at the very end of his career and he was receiving hock injections once every two months.

We put him on Mojo and he only had to be injected once a year, which added five full years to his show career. When he started to need the injections inside of 6 months again, we retired him. We have been manufacturing this product for about 10 years now and have always relied on the people that have actually tried it to help spread the word about it.

About Mojo:

Mojo is for the whole horse, coat, feet, immune responsiveness, bone density, joints and circulation. It is legal on all levels in the United States to compete on. Mojo has multiple joint ingredients for your equine partner, because just like some people’s bodies respond better to Motrin than Aspirin, if your horse does not respond to Glucosamine, they will to Cetyl-Myristoleate or MSM or what-have-you.

Mojo has partnered up with Jeffers Pet Catalog for about 8 years, and still maintains a 5 star rating. You can purchase Mojo at Jeffers along with all your other equine supplies. Jennifer Gilliland is the co-founder and creator of Mojo Joint.