Normal temperature, pulse and respiration for a horse: TPR explained

At rest, a healthy adult horse normally has a temperature of about 37.0 to 38.5°C, a pulse of about 28 to 44 beats per minute, and 8 to 16 breaths per minute. Those are the figures most yards work from, and they are a sound place to start.

They are also where most people stop, which is the problem. A range that wide covers a lot of horses, and it tells you very little about one. A horse that normally sits at 36.9°C and reads 38.2°C this morning is within the textbook range and is also running more than a degree above itself.

So this post covers the numbers, how to take each one properly, and the part that actually makes them useful: knowing your own horse’s normal before the day you need it.

What is a normal temperature, pulse and respiration for a horse?

For an adult horse standing quietly at rest, these are the ranges from British Equestrian’s TPR guide:

Two things are worth knowing before you use that table.

Different sources give slightly different ranges, and none of them is wrong. You will see pulse given as 28 to 44 and, in Rutgers University’s equine fact sheet, as 28 to 48, with resting breathing as 8 to 16 or as 8 to 14. That is a sign of how much healthy horses genuinely vary, not of anyone being careless.

The temperature range may be too high. More on that below, because it changes what counts as a warning.

Foals and young horses run faster pulses and breathing than adults, and a very fit horse often sits at the bottom of the pulse range or below it. The table is for adults.

How do you take a horse’s temperature?

Temperature is the reading most owners are nervous about and the one that is most worth getting comfortable with, because fever is often the first sign that something is wrong.

• Use a digital thermometer. They are cheap, quick and easy to read. Keep one in the first aid kit that is only ever used for the horse.
• Lubricate the end with a little petroleum jelly or lubricating gel.
• Have the horse held or tied up, ideally by someone it trusts, and stand to one side of the hindquarters, never directly behind.
• Lift the tail, insert the thermometer gently into the rectum, and angle it slightly so the tip touches the rectal wall. A thermometer sitting in a ball of droppings reads low.
• Wait for the beep, remove it, read it, and clean it before it goes back in the kit.

Most horses accept this far better than people expect, especially if the first few times are on a quiet day rather than the day the horse is ill. Practising when nothing is wrong is the point.

How do you take a horse’s pulse?

Put your fingers under the horse’s jawbone, on the inside, where the facial artery crosses the bone. Press gently until you feel it pulsing. Use your fingertips, not your thumb, because your thumb has a pulse of its own.

Count the beats for 15 seconds and multiply by four. If you lose count, start again rather than guessing.

The horse needs to be standing quietly and not eating, because chewing moves the jaw over the artery and makes it very hard to count. If the jaw is awkward on your horse, a stethoscope behind the left elbow gives you the heartbeat directly, and it is worth owning one if you want to do this often.

This is a different thing from the digital pulse in the foot. The pulse under the jaw is a rate: how many beats a minute. The digital pulse is about strength: whether the pulse running into a hoof is bounding. A horse can have a normal heart rate and a bounding digital pulse in both front feet, and that combination still needs a vet.

How do you count a horse’s breathing rate?

Stand to the side, far enough back to see the flank, and watch it rise and fall. One rise and one fall is one breath. Count for 15 seconds and multiply by four.

At rest, breathing should be quiet and regular, and the effort should be barely visible. On a cold day the breath from the nostrils is often easier to count than the flank.

Breathing is the reading most easily thrown off by you being there. A horse that turns to sniff you, or stops to look at something across the yard, has changed its pattern. Give it a moment to settle and count again.

Why does your horse’s own normal matter more than the textbook range?

In 2019, researchers from Nottingham Trent University and the Royal Agricultural University took more than 600 temperature readings from 41 healthy horses on one yard. Redwings Horse Sanctuary summarises what they found: a normal range of 36.0 to 38.0°C, rather than the 37.5 to 38.5°C most of us learnt.

It was one yard, so treat it as a strong hint rather than the final word. But it points two useful ways.

• A reading over 38.0°C may be less healthy than it looks. On the old range it sits comfortably inside normal. On the new one it is at the top.
• A reading under 37.0°C may be perfectly fine. Some healthy horses simply run cool, and an owner working from the old figures would worry about a horse with nothing wrong.

The practical answer to both is the same: find out where your horse sits. Redwings’ own example puts it well. A temperature of 37.8°C can be typical for one horse and a warning for another whose average is around 36.9°C.

To build that baseline:

1. Take all three readings at rest, at the same time of day, for several days in a row. A week is better than three days.
2. Pick a quiet time. Not straight after work, not when the horse has just come in from the field, not at feed time.
3. Write every reading down with the date and time. A baseline you remember is not a baseline.
4. Repeat it now and again, and in a different season. A horse’s normal in August is not necessarily its normal in January.

That is the same principle behind reading a digital pulse. You are not comparing your horse against a chart. You are comparing it against itself.

What can raise a horse’s TPR when nothing is wrong?

Plenty, and knowing the list saves a lot of unnecessary worry. All three readings go up legitimately with:

• Exercise. Pulse and breathing rise sharply during work and should come back down steadily afterwards. Wait until the horse has fully recovered before taking a resting reading.
• Excitement or stress. A horse calling for a companion, travelling, or watching the farrier’s van arrive will give you raised readings.
• Heat and humidity. Breathing in particular rises on a hot, close day, and a horse in a heavy rug on a mild one can run warm.
• Having just come in, been fed, or been handled. Give it ten or fifteen minutes.

The test is whether the reading settles. A pulse that is high because the horse is excited comes down when the excitement does. A pulse that stays high in a horse standing quietly in its stable is telling you something.

Pain is the most important reason a resting pulse and breathing rate stay up. A horse in pain from colic or from laminitis will usually show it in its heart rate before anyone has worked out what is wrong.

When should you call the vet about a horse’s TPR?

Ring your vet if:

• The temperature is 38.5°C or above. That is classed as fever. Call especially if it is particularly high, or still raised after the horse has rested and been rechecked.
• The pulse or breathing is well above that horse’s normal while it is standing quietly, and there is no obvious reason such as heat, work or excitement.
• Breathing looks laboured, noisy, or the nostrils are flaring at rest.
• An abnormal reading comes with anything else: dullness, not eating, pawing, looking round at its belly, lying down more than usual, or a reluctance to move.
• You are unsure. A reading you can’t interpret on a horse that isn’t right is a reason to call, not a reason to wait.

When you ring, give the actual numbers and the time you took them. “His temperature is 38.9°C and his pulse is 52, and last week at the same time he was 37.4°C and 36” is a far more useful call than “he feels a bit hot”.

Temperature is worth checking routinely in one situation in particular: after a horse has mixed with horses from outside its normal group, at a show, a clinic or a new yard. Redwings notes that fever is typically the first sign of strangles and tends to appear two to three days, on average, before a horse becomes infectious to others. A daily temperature for the week after an event is one of the cheapest pieces of biosecurity there is.

Where the technology fits

A thermometer, your fingertips and a watch with a second hand are the whole kit here. No app takes a horse’s temperature, and nothing about this skill should be handed to one.

The honest position on Stride for this topic is mostly a list of limits, so here it is plainly.

There is no temperature, pulse or respiration field. You cannot enter a TPR as numbers, there is no baseline worked out for your horse, and there is no alert when a reading is out of range. The screens in the app labelled vitals are scores for health, performance, recovery and competition, not physiological readings, and they should not be read as TPR.

The heart rate in the app is yours, not your horse’s. If you ride with an Apple Watch, the beats per minute you see during and after a ride come from your wrist. There is no equine heart-rate monitor connected to anything.

What you can do today is keep the readings in the same place as everything else. A note on the horse is dated and lands on its health timeline, next to vet visits, farrier visits, feed changes and rides, so 37.4°C, 36, 12, 7am, at rest written as a note every morning for a week is a baseline you can find again. And the things worth recording alongside an abnormal reading are already on the observation list: off food, not drinking, cough, nasal discharge, sweating and signs of colic, each with a mild, moderate or marked severity.

It is a notebook that doesn’t get lost, which for a baseline is most of what you need. It does not read the numbers for you.

If you take one thing from this: take your horse’s temperature, pulse and breathing this week, while it is well, and write them down. The day you need those numbers is the worst possible day to be finding out what normal looks like.