This is regarding my own horse, Maddie. Once upon a time her weight used to adapt perfectly throughout the seasons. In an ideal world we should be aiming for our horses to have slightly more weight going into the winter and slightly less heading into spring to allow for the nutritional changes and natural weight changes, which mimics the natural feeding habits of the wild (mostly semi wild now) horse. Now, I am not ashamed to admit (well maybe slightly), that balancing my many other commitments has meant that my time spent riding has been reduced, which has resulted in my horse becoming overweight. 

It's time for this to change, not only does it make my horse at higher risk for health conditions such as laminitis and EMS, but it also impacts her arthritic joints. I recently had her weighed on a weigh-bridge (which I would highly recommend) and I nearly fell off my chair when I was given the results. Unfortunately with my horse it's not as simple as bringing her in for the day and feeding her soaked hay as she has separation anxiety and would require her whole herd to come in with her. 

It's not practical to have her weighed every month, so as an alternative I'll use a weight measure tape to estimate her weight. Although not as accurate as weighing, it will allow me to monitor any trends over the coming months. As well as this I will calculate her body condition score and have her weighed again as we shift into late autumn/winter. You can find many body condition score guides online, just one example is Fat Scoring | Body Condition Scoring | British Horse Society (bhs.org.uk). Her exercise will be started slowly with mainly walk and trot work due to her fitness levels and arthritis. I will blog her progress every now and again as I am aware it will be a slow process and share anything I find beneficial and effective.

I am simply doing this for myself and also because I believe obesity is a common problem amongst horses, and that its not about shaming people whose horses have become overweight, but about being aware and taking action.