Feeding the Ex-Racehorse: Maintaining Optimum Body Condition

Regularly monitoring your ex-racehorse's weight and condition is crucial to managing weight and maintaining a healthy body condition.

There are several ways to assess your horse’s weight including using a weighbridge, body condition scoring and using a weigh tape.

Being overweight or underweight can have negative effects to the horse’s overall health, for example if they are too fat, the risk of metabolic disease and laminitis is increased, as well as putting excessive strain on cardiovascular and musculoskeletal systems. If they are too thin, they will have limited energy reserves, will prematurely fatigue and take longer to recover.

BODY CONDITION SCORING

Body Condition Scoring (BCS) is a method of assessing your horse's body fat coverage and should form part of your routine management plan. With practice, condition scoring is an accurate way of ensuring that your ex-racehorse does not gain or lose too much body condition and shows results far more quickly than by the eye alone. This enables you to make any dietary adjustments before a problem has occurred. We recommend that condition scoring is carried out on a fortnightly basis in conjunction with weight taping.

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We are often asked ‘what is the optimum body condition score for my horse to be in?’ This can depend upon several factors, such as the type of work and health status of the individual horse. So as a general rule of thumb, the aim is to have a horse in the region of a BCS of 5 or 5.5. If you are unsure about how to BCS and what is the ideal body condition score for your horse or pony, please contact us for advice.