How to Assess the Healthy Weight For A Horse
horse looks sunken and gaunt. Its easy to confuse a too skinny horse with a horse in very fit muscular condition like race horses and long distance horses. These horses do not carry very much body fat but their muscles are well defined and strong. The too skinny horse may look ewe necked the withers may appear very
pronounced and the spine may be easily felt beneath the skin. The ribs and hip bones may be sharply visible and easily felt and the haunches appear sunken.
Horses become too thin for a number of reasons including lack of food stress or illness. Its important to discover why a horse is skinny in order to provide the right feeds or treatment. If a stressed horse also has ulcers the environment needs to be changed and the ulcers treated. Mares that are nursing foals can lose weight rapidly especially when mothering happens when heat and biting insects are at their height. Some breeds like Thoroughbreds and Arabians can be hard keepers and may become too skinny easily.
The horse that is in the perfect has ribs that can be felt but not visible. Muscle definition is visible with no pads of soft fat over neck girth area or haunches. The horse does not look gaunt or rounded but smooth. The neck looks smooth without being cresty or gaunt.
There are a few systems used by veterinarians to score body condition. The most common method is
the Henneke Body Condition Chart. Horses are scored on a scale from one to nine with one being poor and nine being extremely fat. When we first met Trillium she was about a 1 5. Currently she is about 7 5 and has been put on a diet. The University of Kentucky offers a useful PDF that describes how to use the Henneke Condition Chart and explains the methods of scoring.
