Feeding Your Underweight Horse

While many horses are considered overweight and are considered easy keepers, often owners will have horses that are difficult to maintain weight and are considered hard keepers. We provide a brief review of the Henneke Body Condition Scoring System and also discuss the Tribute Wellness System. Together, they can be used to evaluate how well your horses are doing with their diets. We discuss what could be considered an underweight horse and what nutrients these horses may be lacking in the diet. Then our focus switched to just how to feed an underweight horse to bring them back into a proper body condition. Like any diet evaluation, this starts with a horse’s forage portion of the diet. High quality forage is always important for any horse. Then when evaluating the concentrate portion of the diet, we discuss many important considerations for horse owners. Throughout the podcast we give tips and advice on how best to manage the diet of these "hard keepers". Finally, it is worth for extreme cases with horses that are in a very low body condition (BCS 1-2); these animals will need a special refeeding program. In these instances we urge you to seek advice from your veterinarian and you can also reach out to us for help. 

You can access the Tribute Wellness System HERE

While many horses are considered overweight and are considered easy keepers, often owners will have horses that are difficult to maintain weight and are considered hard keepers. We provide a brief review of the Henneke Body Condition Scoring System and also discuss the Tribute Wellness System. Together, they can be used to evaluate how well your horses are doing with their diets. We discuss what could be considered an underweight horse and what nutrients these horses may be lacking in the diet. Then our focus switched to just how to feed an underweight horse to bring them back into a proper body condition. Like any diet evaluation, this starts with a horse’s forage portion of the diet. High quality forage is always important for any horse. Then when evaluating the concentrate portion of the diet, we discuss many important considerations for horse owners. Throughout the podcast we give tips and advice on how best to manage the diet of these "hard keepers". Finally, it is worth for extreme cases with horses that are in a very low body condition (BCS 1-2); these animals will need a special refeeding program. In these instances we urge you to seek advice from your veterinarian and you can also reach out to us for help. 

You can access the Tribute Wellness System HERE

You can learn more about these topics by visiting our expertise page HERE

If you have any questions or concerns about your own horse, please contact us HERE

This podcast was brought to you by Tribute Superior Equine Nutrition