HOW TO

HOW TO: MEASURE YOUR HORSE’S WEIGHT

It is especially important to stay up on your horse’s well-being during the winter. Maintaining body condition throughout these cold, blustery months requires regular maintenance and a keen, educated eye on behalf of us as owners. Here’s a formula for determining your horse’s weight.

BY JENN WEBSTER

Body Length

Heart Girth

Knowing how much your horse weighs – or at least having a close estimate of its weight – is as important as knowing how to take its vital signs. Having an estimate of how much your horse weighs will help you in determining accurate dosages of medicine, dewormer and feeding requirements. It can also help you understand if your equine is experiencing fluctuations in body condition and weight gain or loss. The problem is, scales that can accurately measure the weight of a horse are few and far between. Therefore, it’s helpful to know this handy calculation trick for determining your equine’s weight.

FOUR STEPS: 1 Have your horse stand on level ground. 2 Using a soft measuring tape (those that are used for sewing are good for this), measure your horse’s heart girth by wrapping it completely around the horse’s barrel. This means running it from the withers (slightly lower than the highest point), down to where your cinch or girth would normally sit, all the way around and back up to the withers. There should be no twists in the tape and the tape should

appear in a straight line. Record this measurement in inches. 3 Using your tape again, measure the horse’s body length in inches, beginning at the point of its shoulder all the way back to the point of its buttocks. 4 There are several calculators available on the internet that use the heart girth and body length measurements to estimate a horse’s weight. Or, you can do the math yourself by plugging in the numbers into this formula:

HEART GIRTH X HEART GIRTH X BODY LENGTH / 300 = BODY WEIGHT IN POUNDS.

It’s important to remember that this is an estimate of your horse’s body weight only. If your veterinarian has a scale, that is truly the only way to get an accurate OTHER ACTION PLANS weight measurement. However, some people have gotten creative and loaded their horses into a trailer and weighed their rigs at roadside weigh scales.

Then, they return with the trailer empty to get another measurement. The first weight (with the horse), minus the second (empty trailer) is also a good way to determine how much your horse weighs. Additionally, there are weight tapes available specifically to help determine a horse’s weight but it is interesting to compare what a tape might measure, as compared to that of an actual scale.

Weight tapes are also much less reliable when it comes to measuring the weight of Miniature Horses and ponies. AB