The Flesh Yes, the Stone Never
Horses can eat peaches, and ripe peach flesh is a soft, fragrant treat most horses take happily. But a peach is not one food — it is two, and they have opposite answers. The flesh is safe. The stone at the centre is a hazard twice over: hard, oval and exactly the size to lodge in a horse's gullet, with a kernel inside it that carries cyanide-forming compounds. No peach reaches a horse on this yard until the stone has come out. That single rule is the whole art of feeding peaches.
How to Serve a Peach Safely
Wash the fruit first — peaches carry spray residue on their skin and fuzz — then halve it around the stone, twist the halves apart and lift the stone out with the knife tip. Check a freestone peach and the stone falls away; a clingstone needs a careful cut around it, and any fragment of stone left behind means that piece goes to the compost, not the horse. Slice the flesh into wedges and feed from a flat palm, a peach or two at a time. The skin can stay on. Bruised fruit is fine once the bruise is cut away; mouldy fruit is not — that goes to the bin, not the bucket. Expect a sticky chin afterwards, because peach juice runs, and a horse who loves peaches wears the evidence.
Sugar and the Metabolic Horse
Ripe peach flesh is sweet in the way ripe fruit is, which puts peaches in the same sugar territory as apples and pears. A healthy horse in work can have his peach or two as an occasional summer treat and think no more of it. The easy keeper, the pony with the cresty neck and the horse whose vet has raised laminitis or metabolic warnings get peaches rarely or not at all — and for them there is no version of this treat worth negotiating over.
Windfall Peaches Under the Tree
The dangerous peach is the one nobody prepared. A horse with access to a peach tree will work through the fallen fruit one by one, stones and all, and fermenting windfalls carry the added risks of gorging and colic. Fence a fruiting tree out of grazing, or walk the paddock and pick the falls up daily while the tree is dropping. Wasps congregate in split, ripening windfalls too, which adds a sting risk around the mouth for the horse picking through them.
The Rule Everyone Feeding Him Needs
Most feeding accidents with stone fruit happen because a kind person who does not keep horses offered the treat whole, the way they would eat it themselves. The preparation is quick to do and quick to explain — halve it, stone out, then it is a treat — but it has to reach every grandparent, sharer, neighbour and holiday helper before the peach bowl appears, not after. Broken stones and fragments count as stones: nothing with any piece of pit in it is fed, ever.
Putting 'peaches: flesh only, stone always removed' in his KinsLe Family Sharing profile means the rule reaches every person who feeds him before the fruit comes out of the bowl.