The mare at the viewing is in a heavyweight rug and a coat like a doormat, and the seller says she is "in good condition, about a five". A five out of nine is a horse in moderate condition. A five out of five is an obese one. Before you can use a horse body condition score, you need to know which scale it came from, and in November you need your hands more than your eyes.
This is for the owner going into winter and for the buyer standing in a yard, trying to judge a horse they can barely see. It covers what the score measures, which countries use which scale, the separate score for the neck, why a winter coat changes how you score, and what the evidence says a score means for laminitis.
What a horse body condition score measures
The nine-point scale most people mean comes from a short paper by Don Henneke and colleagues at Texas A&M, published in 1983. They looked at twenty mature Quarter Horse mares to find where fat could be seen and felt, then settled on six areas: the loin over the spine, the ribs, the tailhead, the area behind the shoulder, the neck and the withers. Each horse gets a single score from 1, extremely emaciated, to 9, extremely fat. In 32 mares the score explained 65% of the variation in measured body fat, more than weight, height or girth did on their own.
That is the point of it. A score estimates stored fat, not size. Two horses of the same weight can score differently, and a weigh tape or a weighbridge answers a different question, which is covered in how much a horse weighs.
Henneke body condition score or the 0 to 5 scale
The Henneke body condition score is the American standard. The AAEP, the US association of equine vets, asks rescue and retirement yards to keep horses between 4 and 6 on the Henneke chart. In 1988 Carroll and Huntington, at the state agriculture department in Victoria, Australia, adapted an earlier method into the scale usually given as 0 to 5, and showed on 372 horses that different scorers could repeat it. World Horse Welfare names both systems and says the 0 to 5 one is easier if you have little experience.
| Where | Who | Scale | What counts as healthy |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | AAEP | Henneke, 1 to 9 | 4 to 6 |
| United Kingdom | British Horse Society; England's welfare code | 0 to 5 | 2.5 to 3 (BHS) |
| France | IFCE, the national horse institute | its own grid, 0 to 5 | 2.5 to 3.5 |
| Germany | Kienzle and Schramme (2004) | 1 to 9, adapted for warmbloods | not set in the abstract |
| Netherlands | Sectorraad Paarden | 0 to 5 | 3 |
| Japan | JRA | 1 to 9 | most Thoroughbreds on breeding farms sit at 4 to 6 |
| European Union | EU welfare guide, after AWIN | Carroll and Huntington, written as 1 to 5 | not set |
The British Horse Society calls a score of 2.5 to 3 out of 5 a healthy fat covering, unless your vet says otherwise, and England's welfare code prints the same 0 to 5 chart. France's IFCE uses its own 0 to 5 grid and puts the optimum at 2.5 to 3.5, lower for racehorses and eventers. In Germany a 1 to 9 system for warmbloods was built from 181 horses, and Japan's racing authority, the JRA, uses nine points at its training farm. The EU's own welfare guide prints Carroll and Huntington as 1 to 5. Any horse body condition score chart you find online is one of these, so read the bottom of the range before you read the number.
The cresty neck score
Fat on the crest of the neck has its own score. In 2009 Carter and colleagues described a cresty neck score from 0 to 5 and found it tracked blood insulin. Minnesota's extension service says to aim for 2 or lower, and that 3 or more usually means a cresty neck.
Feel the crest as well as looking at it. The BHS says crest fat can be hard and difficult to move from side to side, unlike the spongy fat elsewhere, and that stallions grow a crest naturally, so a thick neck on an entire tells you less.
Why a winter coat means hands, not eyes
The scale was built with this problem in it. Henneke's team wrote that in the winter months a long, heavy coat complicated visual appraisal, so they felt the horses to score them accurately. World Horse Welfare puts it more bluntly: it is impossible to tell by eye how much fat a horse is carrying.
Condition moves with the seasons, too. One Bristol study scored 96 leisure horses at the end of winter and again in summer: obesity went from 27.08% to 35.41%. The same team found the opposite on the neck: a cresty neck score of 3 or more in 45.83% of the horses at the end of winter and 33.33% at the end of summer, and they could not say whether the crest really grew or a fluffy coat made it harder to judge.
So score with a flat hand. Run it over the ribs, behind the shoulder, along the crest and around the tailhead, and take the rug off to do it. England's welfare code asks owners to remove rugs regularly so body condition can be checked, ideally daily. Ignore the belly. The German warmblood study says a big belly can belong to a lean horse or a fat one, depending on muscle and how much forage is in the gut. Then write the score down with the date, because owners are poor judges of their own horse: in an Australian study owners rated their horses thinner than the researchers did.
What the score says about laminitis and EMS
A high score is a warning, not a diagnosis. In a herd of mostly Welsh and Dartmoor ponies followed through spring grazing, a score of 7 or more on the nine-point scale and a cresty neck score of 4 or more predicted which ponies went on to develop laminitis. So did blood insulin and leptin, and combining the measures did no better than either blood test alone. A British study of 1,010 horses found that weight gain in the previous three months raised the risk of laminitis.
The score can also miss. When the Royal Veterinary College followed 446 ponies for three years, 72.2% scored 7 to 9 out of 9, yet the factors that predicted laminitis were blood markers, not the score. The European vets' consensus on equine metabolic syndrome says a horse can have EMS with a lean body, or carry a lot of fat without it, and that above 7 out of 9 the score stops tracking body fat in a straight line. Before an overweight horse is called a case of EMS, the consensus says, a vet has to show insulin dysregulation, and that takes a blood test.
The thin end matters as well. Minnesota's extension service lists a body condition score of three or less, on the nine-point scale usual in the US, as one of the reasons a horse needs a rug, which is covered in when to blanket a horse. If the score falls in winter, look at the ration first; how much hay a horse eats is where to start. None of this replaces your vet, who decides what a score means for your horse and whether it needs testing.
Scoring a horse at a viewing
Photos in an advert are no substitute for your hands, and a winter coat hides what a summer photo would show. At the viewing, do it by hand:
- Ask for the rug to come off, and score in good light on level ground.
- Feel the six areas yourself. Ribs you cannot find with light pressure mean fat, whatever the coat looks like.
- If the seller gives you a score, ask which scale it is out of.
- Squeeze the crest. Hard fat on a mare or gelding is worth a question; on a stallion, less so.
- Ask about laminitis, restricted grazing and what the horse is fed now.
A cob or native that is round in October is common: British owners reported 31.2% of their horses as obese, with cobs, natives and good doers most often. That is not a reason to walk away, but it is a horse whose diet you will be managing for life. Raise anything that worries you before the pre-purchase vetting, where the vet can tell you whether a blood test is worth adding.
Where we fit
Hoofine does not score horses, and a listing photo taken in a winter coat cannot tell you the horse's condition. What the site can do is put the horses for sale in front of you so you can go and put your hands on them, and help you find a vet near the horse to look before you commit.
