06/11/2024
A great way to leverage winter to achieve the needed weight loss for our “ fatties” 😁
Is It Fair To Clip For Weight Loss?
This may help you decide.
At our rehab facility we are often in the scenario of wanting to aid successful weight loss. This can be the difference between recovery or, in the worst case scenario, deterioration with eventual euthanasia.
I’ve seen several posts recently discussing the merits of clipping but also those who think it cruel.
To help me explain our reasoning and choices we have our friend Zorro modelling a fetching green line for us, we will get to him in a bit.
I want to address the concerns of people who worry that clipping is unethical as the horse will be left cold and shivering. I personally wouldn’t recommend a full body clip for weight loss. You would then need to rug which in my opinion defeats the object.
Firstly, If a horse is overweight, they will have the insulation provided by a layer of fat to stop them becoming painfully or dangerously cold so in essence they will not feel the cold in the same way a lean, clipped horse would.
Secondly, the idea of this exercise is to promote weight loss and by encouraging the horse to feel the cold a little more, we also encourage the mobilisation of those fat stores to be processed to produce heat within the body (this happens via the process of ‘brown fat’ in the body generating heat whilst also encouraging areas of ‘white fat’ to break down to replenish energy stores).
So how do we decide how much hair to remove when we clip? For me it’s a fairly simple observation exercise.
Zorro is one of the much more resource dominant horses in our group meaning that in winter he needs some encouragement to tip the scales back in the right direction.
You can see his coat after a night of rain and you can see exactly which parts of his coat he needs to protect him from the elements because they are wet.
Ergo, everything above the green line stays. He needs that to keep his back warm, to keep the internal organs close to the surface protected and essentially just to protect his skin from the rain.
Everything below the green line you can see isn’t helping to protect from the rain so we can afford to lose that.
The aim is never to make the horse uncomfortable and if after clipping through observation they are showing signs of being too cold then I would absolutely rug and not leave them in discomfort.
The percentage of overweight horses in the U.K. is thought to be around 40% with up to 70% of native ponies being classed as obese. Laminitis is thought to affect as many as 1 in 10 horses every year (although many cases are not caused purely by excess weight). Those figures should really give us something to think about and with those in mind we should look at using the winter to slim our horses down as one of the most important aspects of our yearly care.
