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The Henneke horse body condition scoring system is a numerical scale used to evaluate the amount of fat on a horse's body. It was developed in the early 1980s by Don Henneke at Texas A&M University with the goal of creating a universal scale to assess horses' bodyweight, [ 1 ] and was first published in 1983. [ 2 ]
Healthy body temperature for adult horses is in the range between 37.5 and 38.5 °C (99.5 and 101.3 °F), which they can maintain while ambient temperatures are between 5 and 25 °C (41 and 77 °F). However, strenuous exercise increases core body temperature by 1 °C (1.8 °F)/minute, as 80% of the energy used by equine muscles is released as heat.
Obese American horse: fat deposits can be seen on the back, between the ribs and on the rump. The horse body mass is highly variable, depending on breed, model, physiological state, condition, owner's purpose and usage of the animal. Always 65 % to 75 % water, it is divided on average between 50 % muscle, 11 % bone and 10 % fat.
Among mammals, morphology of the head often plays a role in temperature regulation. Many ungulates have a specialized network of blood vessels called the carotid rete, which keeps the brain cool while the body temperature rises during exercise. Horses lack a carotid rete and instead use their sinuses to cool blood around the brain. [2]
In horses, the lower critical temperature is 5 °C while the upper critical temperature depends on the definition used. [11] Their thermoneutral zone is roughly 5–30 °C (41–86 °F). [12] In mice, the lower critical temperature and upper critical temperature can be the same, creating a thermoneutral point instead of a thermoneutral zone.
In reality, horses of all breeds are warm-blooded mammals and have the same body temperature. The notion of a "hot-blooded" horse is nevertheless taken up in later hippological writings, and remains in use today. Hot-blooded horses are saddle and sport animals, known for their liveliness, finesse, and emotional nature.
Warm-blooded is a term referring to animal species whose bodies maintain a temperature higher than that of their environment. In particular, homeothermic species (including birds and mammals) maintain a stable body temperature by regulating metabolic processes. Other species have various degrees of thermoregulation.
Thermoregulation is the ability of an organism to keep its body temperature within certain boundaries, even when the surrounding temperature is very different. A thermoconforming organism, by contrast, simply adopts the surrounding temperature as its own body temperature, thus avoiding the need for internal thermoregulation.