Alright, in this next lecture we're going to talk about evaluating body condition and, and how to weigh your horse. Now, again continuing on why nutrition is so important, it's not only important for the animal's health, but it's also important to your pocketbook. And this is just showing you that, you know, after paying for housing which, you know, you're either renting stalls, or paying for your own barn or pasture, or wherever you're keeping your animal, this is the next largest cost to any horse owner. And you can see, in the, in the United States, you know, in 2005 over $21 billion were, were spent on feed alone. So, a lot of money is spent on feeding animals, or feeding these horses. But also it's, it's one of the, the most neglected aspects of horse care, and really, I attribute a lot of this to just lack of education, just folks don't understand what it takes to feed these animals, so oftentimes they're not meeting their nutrient requirements or you know, it's not willful negligence. It's just, it's they, they, they just don't know. And after my experiences in South Carolina, as the state equine specialist, where I would go around the state and talk to a lot of horse owners. A lot of these owners want to know more about how do I properly feed my horse? So, so that's why this is, you know, this topic is so important and, and why we're devote, devoting an entire week to it. Now again, there's my favorite picture of the, the fat horse. If you remember from my earlier lectures, and, and, no that's not a real animal. It's photo shopped. But again, it, it brings home the point that, obesity, is a, is a big concern with horses and we see this in the United States where we tend to overfeed our animals thinking we're doing them, a service, by providing them over abundance of nutrients in actu, in actually it, it, it is damaging to their health. So you know things that, that we are certain to see popup more frequency especially here in the United States is something called insulin resistance, and that's like diabetes in humans its' it's very similar disease these are Type II diabetes in humans. And then also obese horses are unsound meaning, they're physically not able to perform to what you're asking them to do. Either to be ridden, or athletic events, or pulling carts or whatever you have your animal doing. They become what we call unsound. And some of that can be attributed to obesity and there are some other disorders which we will cover later this week. So, you know, how do you estimates a horse's nutrient requirements and how much do we feed? You're going to hear me say this time again and again throughout the week, that we base our diets on the horse's body weight. And you'll see anywhere from 2% to 3% and hearing from equine nutritionists, you know, some of these researchers. We have a wonderful one here, Dr. Laurie Warren, at the University of Florida. They're recommending you're feeding upwards of 3% of their body weight but diets higher in fiber. So, we'll talk more about that, in these next few lectures. So you base everything off their body weight. And then the other thing we look at, is what we call body condition score. And really that's looking at fat deposition. You know, how much fat does that animal have? And, and we'll talk about metabolism, because, like us, you know, here, where, where I have a little extra Because of my slower metabolism in my age, that you're not able to burn off calories as much, or you burn off calories really fast. So their metabolisms do vary, and that's why there's this body condition scoring system. So that's what we're going to talk about. Now, how many of you have a livestock scale in your backyard? Nobody, right? I mean the majority of horse owners don't have a livestock scale. Luckily I do here at a large research university. On our horse farms we have large livestock scales, but most people don't. So there is a way, a simple way that you can estimate a horse's body weight, and I've actually redone some you know, during some of our education we have actually weight taped horse, we call it weight tape, and going and weighed' em on the livestock scale, and they was always within plus or minus 50 pounds. So it was, it was pretty accurate. So the way you do this is you get any sort of long tape or measurement. And you measure around the, the, body width. What we call the body width. Around the girth of the horse. So, you want to go behind the elbows. Maybe just right behind the withers, or just over the top of the withers depending on the breed. And you want to get this heart girth measurements. And you can do this in inches or centimeters. And then the next measurement is the body length. So we go from the point of the shoulder to the point of the buttock and we, we take that long measurement. Now this is the simple equation that you can use. And you can either do it in the metric system or here in the United States with our, our weight system with pounds. So if you are doing it with pounds basically what it is, is girth times girth times length divided by 330 that will give you your weight in pounds. If you are doing the metric system on kilograms you do girth, girth times length same thing but them you divide by 11,900, and that will get your weight in kilograms. Now, just to give you an example, I thought it would be worthwhile to, to put this together. So let's say this, this animal weighed or weighed, excuse me It's girth measurement was 70 inches, or 178 centimeters The length was 72 inches or 183 centimeters. So we'll plug this into our equation. So we've got, here we're figuring it out in pounds, and then here we're figuring it out in kilograms. Okay, so you can you know, figure this out with a calculator, or do long hang. And if we do the top portion, we get you know 352,000 plus. If we do if for the kilograms, we got over 5 million. So then we carry it into the equation, divide by 330 for pounds, 11,900 for kilograms. And this is what approximately the horse would weigh using those measurements. It's a very, very simple tool we use anybody anywhere in the world with, with any sort of measurement tool can do this. Now the body condition scoring, I'm going to use the Henneke BCS system and, and I actually knew Dr. Henneke. He, he was from Texas A & M, where I earned my, my doctorate. When he designed this many, many years ago. So this, this is the most common used in around the world, but there are other body condition scoring systems. I know in Europe they, they might use a five point system, but this one is a nine point system, we are basing this on all those, those points on this animal here. So these are all the areas of fat deposition that we are looking at. So, we'll go through these, you know, one at a time and I, I am sorry to have to show you this image. It's, it's, it's very upsetting, it's, it's, it's an animal I hope none of you ever, ever see. I've been very fortunate in not seeing a one, I've seen a two, which is, which made me very angry when I saw it. But this is something you should never see. And this is an animal that's been extremely neglected and has no fat deposition. Is basically a, a skeleton in skin. It, it's really sad. Now, the good news is, if you do find an animal like this, which we, we do, you know, some of our rescue organizations here in the United States finds 'em. You can slowly turn them around and get 'em back to a normal body condition. But, a lot of times too, they're just euthanized, because it, it's really horrific. Now a two is, is not any better, it's still a very, very thin, emaciated animal, not quite yet to the one, so there's a little bit of tissue on the body, maybe a little bit of muscling, really no fat anywhere and, you know, it's, it's, it's a very unhealthy animal at that point. Now, I've seen a few three's, not a lot, in, in my career, and the threes, you know, especially with animals that can get sick or ill, for whatever reason if, if, you know, especially under veterinary care. You know, they may, may slip down into a three, and I've seen a few horses in this condition. It, again, it's, it's thin, but they do have some muscling. It, there, there is some cover on the body, you can read the description there. So again, not ideal, not something you want to see, but not, not an animal that, that's on the verge of death, that, you know, this animal just needs some more energy in its diet to, to rebound from this, and we'll cover that in our next lecture on, on how to do that. Now, a Fourier tend to see, especially in very athletic animals in a condition of a four, four and a half. And you know, it's not too uncommon to see in animals that, that compete quite a lot because, quite a bit, because, you're, you're, you're trying to get them as many nutrients as possible, and they just can't seem to maintain weight. So there are some feeding strategies for these animals to try and get them up into that five range. But a four is, is still thin, it's not what we really like to see, but, you know, it's understandable especially younger horses trying to put condition on, so you can read the description there on some of the things you see with four. And then five is basically what we consider perfect or five and half is really optimal for most horses. So you know, things like you can't really see the spine, you can't really see the ribs, but you can still go and feel the ribs and it's just got this nice, healthy rounded appearance. And these are the animals, you know, they're, still able to, to be really athletic. But they've got good body condition or good fat cover, so they do have some energy reserves in their, in their body. So, so again, five and a half is the optimum body condition score for the majority of horses. Now, where that might differ, is as you add more fat, we tend to like to see our brood mares in a six and a half. And, and really the reason is, after parturition, after they give birth, they go into a lactation cycle. And these foals eat a lot, they drink a lot of milk, so they, they really take a lot out of their moms and so we anticipate them losing at least a body condition score. So they'll dip down to a five, five and a half easily, after a lactation cycle. And then we try to put the weight back on before next years foal hits the ground, as you wean off this year's foal. So that's, that's why we recommend a six and a half for broodmares Again, very fleshy appearance, and you can start to tell like, you, you know [UNKNOWN] as say look down the crease of the back. A very thin animal, I mean, it's going to be a tent, but as they get fat deposition, that's going to start to crease, and we'll see as, as they go from a six to a nine that gets really deep, where you almost have like this fat valley looking at some of these horses. So now, a seven is, is really getting into the range where these animals are, are less healthy. They're not going to be as athletic, they may tend to overheat a little bit. Especially, you know, if you're out in the desert or hot areas of the world, you know, you have an overweight animal. You're trying to work them, they have too much fat deposition. They're going to overheat. So you can see the ribs are starting to get a little bit more difficult to fill in that crease is really becoming more evident. Now, a eight, and a nine again you're getting into fat, obese horses. This is where you really do not want to see, with, with our animals. It's just, it's just too much weight for them to carry. So, with the eight you know, you can maybe just fill the ribs. They've really got a prominent crease. And then nine is just really obese animal and you can even see some of the fat on the side of this horse. One thing we always look at too I highlight here is the crusty neck, so you can see this is just pure fat right there so that is, is not healthy for that animal and we can see some of the fat here, and then, really it's in the rear, rear end of the horse, it's just, it's huge. It's huge, and again, not healthy for these animals. I mean, they're not going to be able to carry that weight, their structure, you know, they, they may come up lame, you know, when they, when they get some injuries on their, on their legs. Again, Lamanitis, some other things that, that we would be concerned with. So, this is something you do not want to see with your equids. So, you know, taking all of that, you know, the body condition, we're going to, we're going to jump into the requirements, the daily requirements of horses. And kind of give you some feeding strategies as we build this, this week of nutrition. So I'll see you then.
