According to guidelines published by the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, airway damage resulting from smoke can take four to six weeks to heal and ideally horses should not return to work for this amount of time after smoke has cleared. | Photo: iStock

Q. I live in California where our air quality has been poor due to wildfire smoke. I’ve been wearing an N95 mask (a respiratory device that eliminates 95% of very small particles) when outside doing barn chores, but my horse is living outside and breathing the air with no filtration system. I haven’t ridden for more than two weeks. Now that we’ve had rain, the air quality is much better, and I am planning on putting my horse back in work. I’m worried about his lung health though. Is there a supplement that might help?

A. Protecting lung health is vital to equine performance, so you were wise not to work your horse in poor-quality air. Equine lung performance isn’t greatly altered by conditioning the way that the other systems of the horse can be improved (i.e., the cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems). Therefore, any damage to lung tissue can have a lasting effect on lung health and future performance ability.

I would strongly recommend that, before putting your horse back to work, you contact your veterinarian for guidance. At the end of 2017 the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine published some guidelines for horses exposed to wildfire smoke, which state that airway damage resulting from smoke can take four to six weeks to heal and that ideally horses should not return to work for this amount of time after smoke has cleared. Obviously, this will depend on how severe the air pollution was where your horse lives. Your veterinarian should be able to guide you as to how long is appropriate to give your horse before retuning him to work