Horse feeding plan (Canada): the national code, a condition score of 3, and feeding through the cold

By Sebastien Kister

Last reviewed 6 November 2026

Every Canadian province requires adequate food and water, directly or by forbidding an owner to leave an animal in distress for want of them, and none of them says how much. The detail lives in one national document, the Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Equines, and whether it binds you depends on where your horse lives. In Quebec, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador its requirements are law for every horse; Quebec made them so in 2024. It also puts a number on condition: corrective action at a score of 3 or lower, and at 8 or higher.

One national code, and what it requires

The Code was published in 2013 by the National Farm Animal Care Council (NFACC), and it separates Requirements, which are "to be implemented" at a minimum, from Recommended Practices, whose absence does not mean a standard is unmet. On feeding, its Requirements are short:

• Water: "Horses must have access to safe, palatable and clean water in quantities to maintain health and vigour", with "special attention" to its availability and intake in extreme cold or heat, and troughs and automatic waterers cleaned and kept working.
• Forage: "Horses must have daily access to forage that is free from visible mould and has minimal dust", and only feedstuffs appropriate for the species, with concentrates stored where a horse cannot overeat.
• The ration: a diet "adequate for maintaining health and vigour" that addresses maintenance and activity needs and the individual horse and its environment, and access to salt in the ration or free choice.
• Condition: corrective action at the scores below, and horses "must not be starved or prevented from eating for prolonged periods in order to reduce BCS".
• Laminitis: a laminitic horse must receive appropriate lifelong management and treatment.

The Code is being revised. The update began in January 2024, public comments closed on 12 March 2026, and NFACC projects completion in April 2027.

Who it binds, province by province

Over all of them sits section 446 of the Criminal Code, which makes it an offence for an owner or keeper to wilfully neglect or fail "to provide suitable and adequate food, water, shelter and care". Ontario also exempts agricultural animal care carried on under "reasonable and generally accepted practices", and Alberta and Manitoba have similar defences for generally accepted practices of animal care, which in practice is where the Code comes back in: it is the industry's own statement of what those practices are.

The number it does give: 3 and 8 on a 1 to 9 scale

Most welfare laws stop at "adequate" and leave the judgement to whoever looks at the horse. The Code draws the line itself: "corrective action must be taken at a BCS of 3 or lower and at a BCS of 8 or higher (on the 1-9 scale)", and "veterinary advice must be obtained if animals do not respond to the corrective action". For donkeys and mules, on a 1 to 5 scale, the lines are 2 and 4. The scale in its appendix is adapted from Alberta Agriculture's "What's the Score?".

Between the lines, the Code recommends a score of 4 to 6 for most horses, 5 to 7 for broodmares, and changes in energy of no more than 10 to 15 percent a week when a horse has to lose or gain. It counts the fat horse as a welfare problem as well as the thin one, and the horse at 8 needs a plan as much as the horse at 3. In winter a thick coat can hide weight loss: Manitoba's advice is to look at the horse daily and feel for the ribs.

How much: 1.5 to 2 percent, and more below −15 °C

The Code's working figure is that an average mature horse eats 1.5 to 2 percent of its body weight in feed a day; a horse without pasture or free-choice forage should be fed at least twice a day, and feed changes made over 7 to 10 days. Its recommendations say dry feed should not fall below 1.5 percent of ideal body weight even for a horse that needs to lose weight.

The cold is where Canadian advice departs from everyone else's. The Code's thermoneutral zone ends at 5 °C, and below it a horse "need[s] more feed (particularly forage)". Ontario's agriculture ministry puts the lower critical temperature of an adult horse in Canada at −15 °C, and of a growing horse at 0 °C:

• below −15 °C, an adult's maintenance energy rises 2.5 percent per degree, "or the equivalent of 2% more feed";
• at −40 °C, that is 4.5 to 5 kg more feed a day;
• free-choice hay runs at 2 to 2.5 percent of body weight, 12 to 15 kg a day for a 600 kg horse;
• deep snow can raise maintenance energy needs by 40 percent, and a horse needs 10 to 21 days to adapt to a drop in temperature.

Saskatchewan's version of the rule is two pounds more feed for every 5 °C below −15 °C, and Manitoba's advice is to plan on about half as much hay again in deep cold. The thresholds differ by source; the direction never does, and good hay is the easiest way to add the energy.

Water, when everything is frozen

A horse drinks more in the cold, not less: the Code's appendix, from the US National Research Council, gives an idle 500 kg horse about 25 litres a day at 20 °C and about 42 litres at −20 °C, and the Code notes that needs may rise in the cold because water intake follows feed intake. Ontario recommends heated water at 2 to 10 °C and points out that a horse would have to eat ten times its water requirement in snow. The Code says snow alone will not meet a horse's needs, though that is explanation rather than a Requirement. Quebec's Act goes further and settles it in law: "snow and ice are not water".

What Canadian hay and pasture can do

• Alsike clover causes photosensitization and "big liver syndrome". Ontario's ministry says it should make up no more than 5 percent of a horse's feed, and that seed mixes for horse pasture and hay should not contain it at all.
• Red maple leaves, wilted, destroy red blood cells. The risk runs from June to October, leaves collected after mid-September act faster, and 1.5 to 3 g of leaves per kg of body weight, about 0.7 to 1.4 kg for a 450 kg horse, causes disease. Fresh leaves do not appear to; horses often die within 18 to 24 hours.
• Mouldy, dusty hay: hay baled too wet moulds, with respiratory disease and colic as the risks, which is why the Code's forage Requirement is about mould and dust before it is about quantity.
• Lush pasture, "plentiful, bright green grass", is one of the laminitis risks the Code names, and it recommends restricting at-risk horses from grazing it.

Write it down, because you are not the one feeding

A horse at a boarding barn is fed by whoever does the feed round, and in February that may be someone breaking ice before work. The extra flake below −15 °C, the soaked hay, the reason this one stays off the spring grass: none of it survives a change of hands unless it is written where the person feeding can read it. And a condition score is only useful as a series. One score says how the horse looks today; three, a month apart, say whether the winter ration is working.

Sources

• National Farm Animal Care Council — Code of Practice for the Care and Handling of Equines (2013) and the revision under way
• Criminal Code, section 445.1 and section 446
• Quebec: MAPAQ guide to the Animal Welfare and Safety Act and guide to the regulation (in French), and the Act's English text
• Ontario: O. Reg. 444/19 and the Provincial Animal Welfare Services Act, 2019
• Alberta: Animal Protection Act; British Columbia: Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and Animal Care Codes of Practice Regulation
• Manitoba: The Animal Care Act and Animal Care Regulation; Saskatchewan: The Animal Protection Act, 2018 and its regulations
• Prince Edward Island: Animal Welfare Act and Animal Welfare Regulations; Newfoundland and Labrador: Animal Health and Protection Act and Animal Protection Standards Regulations; New Brunswick: SPCA Act and General Regulation 2000-4; Nova Scotia: Animal Protection Act
• Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness — Management and feeding of horses in cold weather
• Manitoba Agriculture — Horse winter management; Saskatchewan — Feeding horses during winter
• Ontario ministry fact sheets: alsike clover poisoning, red maple leaf poisoning and the Agronomy Guide, chapter 3 (mouldy hay)

The Code is being revised; check for the new edition before relying on a Requirement quoted here.

Also available in English (United States, United Kingdom, Australia) · Deutsch (Deutschland, Österreich, Schweiz) · Español (España, México) · Português (Portugal, Brasil) · Français (France, Belgique, Suisse, Québec) · Italiano (Svizzera, Italia) · Nederlands (Vlaanderen, Netherlands) — one question, seventeen regulatory answers, and Canada is the one where a single national code means something different on each side of a provincial line: binding on every horse in Quebec, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador, an acceptable standard in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, a defence in British Columbia and New Brunswick, and not adopted in Ontario, Alberta or Nova Scotia.

Next: horse vaccination in Canada — the core vaccines, rabies and EEE, and the six-month rule at the show.