Cheap Weight Equipment for Large Animals

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Jack Mauldin
April 27, 2009

 

People are always asking us what the weight is of one of our bigger animals. We also would like to have a good estimated weight for our own knowledge and as input for medicine given according to the weight. The scales for weighing larger animals are just too expensive for a small farm like ours and I can not justify that type of expense. Recently I was browsing through one of our goat medical books - "Sheep & Goat Medicine" by D. G. Pugh. The book had an easy way of getting a good weight estimate that some of the contributors to the book use.

You only have to have something for measuring around the heart girth and the length from the shoulder to the hip.  I purchased a cloth tape that measures up to 60 inches and today I did the measurements on PW's War Dancer. He was 15 months old for this measurement.

The formula for estimating the weight is  (heart girth * hearth girth * body length) / 300  = estimated weight.

In our measurements of PW's War Dancer, his heart girth is 44 inches and the body length is 36 inches. So our calculation was

(44*44*36) / 300 = 232 lbs.