The Horse Trust, in tandem with the British Equine Veterinary Association, considers equine obesity to be one of the highest ranking equine health risks today and we are working with a number of horse world bodies to come up with practical solutions to enable human behaviour around equine obesity to be changed for the better.

The Horse Trust created and piloted The Weigh To Win (#theweightowin) scheme in collaboration with University of Liverpool back in 2019 in order to recognise and reward exhibitors in show classes with the healthiest equine body condition.  The programme has been further developed to spread the word on how best to maintain healthy equine weight. 

People get very upset by seeing photos of underweight horses in the media, but in reality, far more horses are obese than are underweight. This is very worrying for vets who are finding that they have to treat these horses with serious health conditions like Equine Metabolic Syndrome and Laminitis.

Peoples’ perceptions of what is a healthy weight have become skewed towards the higher body condition scores. We would like to help to reset this balance and this page offers advice, information and some success stories in our quest to see more healthy weight horses!