Some healthy horse treats and a cookie to
"fake your horse into taking his medicine"

• Horse Cookies
• Stuffed Molasses Apples
• Garlic
• Raw Eggs
• Cider Vinegar
• Carrot Apple Paté with Faux Caviar
• Sonny's Apples
• Medicine Cookies

The cookie recipe is as follows:

1 cup uncooked oatmeal
1 cup flour
1 cup shredded carrots
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar
2 tbsp. vegetable oil
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup molasses

• Mix ingredients in bowl as listed.
• Make little balls and place on cookie sheet.
• Bake at 350 for 15 minutes or golden brown in color.  
• I found the dough very "goopy" so I rolled it in plastic wrap in a roll about the size of a quarter and partially froze it so that it would slice off in neat little rounds. Like refrigerator cookies. Worked like a charm!

2 apples
1 cup bran
1 shredded carrot
3/4 cup molasses
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup sweet feed
2 sprigs of parsley or green carrot tops
2 seedless green grapes
Confectionery (sp.?) sugar

• Core two apples and dig out as much of the insides as you can, like you would for a pumpkin on Halloween. Set apples aside.
• Mix shredded carrot with bran, molasses, brown sugar and sweet feed in a large bowl. 
• Add more molasses or bran to give mixture a stiff consistency, Scoop mixture out of bowl and press into cored apples.
• Press fairly tight.

TO GARNISH:
Drip a small amount of molasses over the top so it runs down sides of the apple. Add a sprig of parsley or carrot greens, top with the grape, sprinkle with confectionery sugar and serve immediately! Serves two horses.

OR SERVE:
After you've cored apple, slice in half and press ingredients into each half, garnish the same, and serves four horses.

Recipe taken from "The Original Book of Horse Treats".

RAW EGGS
Beat 1 to 3 eggs well and stir into grain once a day for a shiny coat. Because the old egg mixture will attract flies and fly eggs, make sure to clean the feed bucket thoroughly after every feeding!

CIDER VINEGAR
Feed two ounces of cider vinegar twice daily for Vitamin C. This helps stimulate appetite and balance the immune system. Use good cider vinegar from a health food store, not the caramel colored vinegar usually found at most supermarkets.

2 carrots, diced
1 apple, sliced
1/3 cup honey (or molasses)
1/4 cup water
Hay Cubes
Handful of horse feed pellets
Handful of raisins

• Place apples, honey, bran, and water into blender. 
• Add carrots slowly and blend until pureed. 
• Mixture should be pasty; add more bran if necessary. 
• Spread liberally onto each hay cube and top with one raisin and a sprinkle of pellets ("faux caviar")

4 macintosh appples
1/2 cup corn syrup

• Peel and quarter apples. 
• Place apples in a feed bucket.
• Pour syrup over the apples.
• Serve.

A couple of selected notes from the recipe donor (Esmerelda): 

• These are NOT quick to make. It takes me about an 1.5 hrs to make a week's worth. You really need to make them a dose (or a cookie) at a time, because if you try to make a big batch (to save time) with a whole bunch of crushed pills thrown in, you will have no idea exactly how much pill powder is in each cookie. 
• I used to make them one at a time, in the same bowl. NOW I measure out all my ingredients in a ton of small bowls all over the counter. It makes for more dishes, but when you're talking about having to measure molasses out 14 times and your hands are already covered with dough and things are getting messier and messier, it's worth it.
• Wear gloves. I make my cookies with bute and I don't want any medicine on any part of my body, "just in case". I wear dental non-latex vinyl type gloves. They fit close yet still protect me from the medicine.
• Experiment with just how much shortening and molasses make a good consistency. I found I had to modify the recipe just a tad to ensure the cookie was not too squooshy and would hold it's own form.

You will need:

one coffee bean grinder
oatmeal
molasses
brown sugar
shortening
two bowls
waxed paper and a fork (for mixing).

These amounts are per dose:

• Take 1/4 cup of oatmeal, grind it up in the coffee bean grinder (to a rough flour-like texture), pour into a bowl.
• Add a heaping tablespoon of shortening, {I use one scant tbsp. -- Es}
• add two tablespoons of molasses {I use one -- Es}
• add a teaspoon of brown sugar {I use two -- Es}
• Mix with a fork, it should be just like cookie dough.
• Grind up a single dose of pills in the coffee bean grinder. {Not only did this not work for me, but when I finally shook the grinder until it did, I found I couldn't dislodge all the pill powder from the grinder's nooks and crannies enough for the medicine amount to be an accurate measurement -- Es}
• Add the ground up pills to the dough mix with another teaspoon of molasses (more or less, depends on how dry the dough mix was to begin with) {I don't do this -- Es}.
• Mix well, until all the pill powder is in the dough.
• Scrape all the dough out of that bowl and roll it in oatmeal in the other bowl until it is covered - will look like a cheese ball covered with nuts.
• Wrap in waxed paper.

Serve with grain at feeding time - just like a treat.  I use this to medicate my horse twice a day, since he is in a boarding stable. The management feeds him and tosses in one "cookie" per feeding, no mess, and the horse eats it all.

I'd like to contribute another very good way of getting bute into horses. If it works for you, it's great, because there is no mess and no preparation ahead of time.

For horses who enjoy treats, start feeding Canada Mints. A lot of horses eat and enjoy candy canes and starlight peppermints, so it's an easy switch when you begin feeding these. Canada Mints look very much like bute although a bit thicker.

Once your horse is used to eating them and enjoying them, you can try feeding one or two first and then slipping a bute in between. I usually get a handful of about 5 or 6 mints and feed a couple, then a bute, then the rest of the mints.

The horse *will* eventually catch on depending on how smart he is, but I have found this to work very well. Once the horse catches on, I just stick the bute in there anyway (sort of tuck it inside his mouth, inside lower jaw on the side like where a person would chew tobacco) and then feed a few more mints. This way he doesn't even know where the bute came from.

The Canada Mints are rather strong so even though he will realize he's eaten something else, it helps mask the bute quite well and even my very fussy horse gets "over it" quickly.

Often I follow it up with a carrot or a handful of grain, too. Helps make it a positive experience, and rather than turning him off to the whole experience he learns that while he might notice something mildly unpleasant, overall this is still treat time.

Works best if you feed these mints regularly even when not needing bute.