Yesterday we talked started talking about laminitis and briefly touched on obesity and insulin resistance...
It all has to do with weight! Although body weight tapes can be useful to detect changes in weight, they are not a perfectly accurate estimate of weight for your horse. Moreover, once you get that number, what do you do with it? Every horse is a different height; therefore, each horse has a different weight that is right for it. Because of these differences, we strongly recommend “Body Condition Scoring.” This scoring system places a number on your horse based on certain visual factors. At the end of this document, we have attached the entire system for your reference.
Briefly, the BCS scale for horses is 1 to 9, whereas 1 is the skinniest and 9 is the fattest, and 5 is ideal (for ALL breeds!). The easiest landmarks to look at are the ribs, the rump, and the neck. In an ideal weighted horse (5/9 BCS), you can very easily feel the ribs, but not see them. The rump is rather flat across the top, and there is no “cresty” neck. The harder you have to dig to feel the ribs, the more overweight they are. Although you do not want the rump to be pointy on top, once you start getting that trough, or “butt” shaped appearance, they are overweight. (Keep in mind that some horses do have some boney changes on their top line that will always be there no matter what weight they are, especially jumpers.) The “cresty” neck is the worst of all! Just like in people where belly fat is the worst, so is the neck fat in horses – it secretes the most (bad) hormones that cause issues in the horse. The only exception to the rule is stallions, who more naturally have a cresty neck, but there is a limit even for them!
"Cresty" neck
Obese horse
For a very helpful body condition scoring chart, please visit Kentucky Equine Research's site.
More on laminitis tomorrow!
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