How Do You Score A Horses Body Condition?
Condition scoring a horse can be useful in assessing feeding needs and overall health where there is no access to scales. Employ a few basic principles to make a somewhat subjective process more manageable. Use the horse body condition scoring system developed by D. R. Henneke, and widely used in the horse world, to score your horse. Here’s how. Consider the horse’s body as if divided into six sections; the neck, withers, shoulder, ribs, loins and croup. Look at the each area of the horse separately. Decide if it is poor, very thin, thin, moderately thin, moderate, moderately fleshy, fleshy or extremely fat. When possible, feel the horse with your bare hand in these areas to help your assessment. Assign each area a numerical score corresponding to the thickness of flesh covering the area, with one being “poor” and nine being “extremely fat.” Note these scores on a small pad of paper. Total the numbers for each of the six body areas. Divide the total from Step 4 by six to find the overa
