guessing the horse weight seeing it

Question

guess weight   hello ma'am. this is a thoroughbred racehorse. he's now a 7 year old gelding. this photo was taken on 17/09/2009 i.e at that time, it was a 4 year old. is this horse in fine condition or under weight? can you roughly guess the weight of this horse seeing its body frame. it stands at 15.3hh.

Answer
Hello Rohit,

Thank you for your question.  I'm not even going to hazard a guess at what this horse weighs, it's hard to do from a photo.  But if I were going to make a judgement on body condition, I would say he is a body condition score (BCS) of 4.0.  Deciding what his ideal BCS should be is a bit subjective.  Performance horses should score 4-5 depending on their sport, 4.5 for racehorses is reasonable to expect.  Pleasure horses should be more of a 5-6 BCS.  So from that, my personal opinion is that gaining another 1/2 a BCS would be good.  Unfortunately, there is not yet a recognized correlation between BCS and body weight, so I can't tell you how many pounds of weight 1/2 a BCS gain would be.

Thanks, Corlena