An excerpt from The Ultimate Guide for Horses in Need, published by Horse Nation on January 20, 2022, reprinted there with permission from Trafalgar Square Books.
Training Appropriately for Your Horse’s BCS
by Stacie G. Boswell, DVM, DACVS — excerpted from The Ultimate Guide for Horses in Need (Trafalgar Square Books, 2020)
The excerpt lays out how to match a rescue or rehabilitation horse’s training load to his Body Condition Score, from a starved horse who should do nothing but eat, heal, and learn to be touched, up through the overweight horse who has been killed with kindness.
In 1983, Dr. Don Henneke and his colleagues at Texas A&M University published a landmark paper describing a semi-quantitative way of assessing and documenting fat and muscle coverage in horses. It is useful for monitoring weight changes over time. Therefore, rescue horses should be evaluated and their BCS recorded on a monthly basis. Fat is assessed over the horse’s neck, withers, behind the shoulders, along the ribs, and across the loin and tailhead. Each location is scored on a scale of one to nine, and then the average is calculated.
A healthy horse’s BCS is 4, 5, or 6. Horses that score 7 or above are overweight, while 3 and below is malnourished. A BCS of 1 is a state of severe starvation with almost no fat or body reserves remaining.
From there the excerpt walks through each stage: BCS 1–2 (medical care, gentle handling, no exercise), BCS 3 (slow in-hand groundwork, short trotting increments, no cantering), BCS 4 (building toward longeing and ground-driving), BCS 5–6 (a veterinary soundness check before riding begins), and BCS 7–9 (why overweight rescues still need an organized, incremental plan).
Read the full excerpt at Horse Nation. The Ultimate Guide for Horses in Need is available directly from Stacie or from Trafalgar Square Books.