Feeding Watermelon to Your Horse

Watermelons are a favorite treat during hot summer days. It's pretty natural to want to share a treat with your friends—your equine friends included. While rinds don't taste that great to us (unless you pickle them or cook them in a stir-fry), your horse will probably crunch them down with zeal. But are those watermelon rinds safe for your horse to eat? The answer is yes. In small quantities, watermelon rind is fine. Your horse can eat the ripe part, too, seeds and all. Some may not like melon, while others will be wild about it.

Fruit Sugars in Watermelon

One thing people worry about when feeding watermelon to their horse is the seemingly high sugar content. As its name implies, watermelon is mostly water. In fact, a serving of watermelon is about 90 percent water. That means roughly 10 percent of a watermelon is sugar. In a cup of diced watermelon, there is about 0.5 grams of fiber and 10 grams of sugar. There are also a few vitamins and minerals in there—mainly vitamins A and C, magnesium, and phosphorus.

Sugar occurs naturally in all plants. Even carrots—a favorite root vegetable fed to horses, quite often by the bucketful—can contain about 6 grams of sugar per cup of a diced root. A horse's natural food, pasture grass, has sugar, too. At certain times of the year, the amount of sugar in grass can be more than 25 percent. Over the course of a day's eating, a horse will eat several pounds of sugar. This presents a problem only when they eat too much, as too much sugar in their grass can lead to laminitis and colic.1 As you can see, your horse would have to eat a lot of watermelon before the sugar would become a problem.