How to Assess the Healthy Weight For A Horse

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. It’s 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.

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.