Equine Weight Management
This project aims to promote the use of equine weigh tapes, equine weigh bridges and fat scoring as methods of maintaining horses at a healthy body weight. The project helps owners to identify when their horse is overweight, underweight or of ideal weight and provide accurate measures of horse’s body weight that are essential for calculating correct feeding rations and medication dosage.
Maintaining horses at a healthy body weight optimises their health, promotes good welfare and can improve competition and breeding performance. Improvement of performance can have positive economic implications due to increased animal value and improved breeding output.
The project promotes the regular use of equine weigh tapes and fat scoring to horse owners to enable necessary changes in body weight and associated feeding to be identified. Project participants submit their horse’s weigh tape and fat score results to CAFRE on a monthly basis via an online form. This information will develop an understanding of the health status of the Northern Ireland equine population and enable fluctuations in equine body weight to be identified.
