Yes — a Gentle Fruit Treat
Horses can eat pears, and a ripe pear is among the softest, juiciest treats the fruit bowl offers. The flesh is fragrant and mild, the skin is fine to eat, and even a horse with elderly teeth manages pear more easily than a crisp apple. As with every fruit treat, the fruit itself is not the risk: the risks are the size of the piece, the amount across a day, and the pears nobody handed over at all.
Quarter It and Mind the Core
Offer a whole pear to a keen horse and you have offered a round, slippery mouthful at exactly the size a greedy horse tries to swallow under-chewed — and a piece like that can lodge in the gullet. Quartering lengthwise takes seconds and removes the worry. Coring as you quarter is a good habit: the seeds themselves are no realistic threat at the scale of a pear or two, but taking the core out keeps the pieces slim and chewable, and stops a horse vacuuming up a whole core in one grab. Slices and wedges are equally good; whole and round is the shape to avoid.
Sugar in a Softer Package
Do not let the gentleness fool you — a ripe pear is a sweet fruit, carrying sugar in the same range as an apple. One pear, quartered, as an occasional treat suits a healthy horse in regular work perfectly well. For the easy keeper who blooms on nothing, the cresty pony, or the horse whose vet has him on a low-sugar regime for laminitis or metabolic reasons, pears move to the rare list, and celery or cucumber takes their place in the treat bucket on ordinary days.
Pears on the Ground: Windfalls and Wasps
A pear tree overhanging a paddock in season is a quiet hazard. Fallen pears are eaten steadily and unsupervised by any horse who can reach them — far more fruit than a treat should ever amount to, with gorging and colic at the end of the glut. Ripening falls are also wasp magnets, and a horse biting into a wasp-occupied pear can be stung in the mouth. Pick windfalls up out of grazing daily while the tree drops, or fence the tree's fall zone off until the season ends.
Serving Without Fingers Getting Nipped
Pears are exciting, and an eager horse diving at a quartered pear can catch a fingertip he never meant to. Offer pieces on a flat, open palm with fingers together, or drop them into his bucket if he is the snatching type. Feed one horse at a time at a fence line — a row of horses competing for pear quarters through rails is where bites happen, and they land on horses, not on the person who caused them. Wash bought or orchard pears quickly before quartering if they have been sprayed.
Adding pears, quartered, to a horse's set treats in KinsLe's Care Teams means whoever covers his care on a summer weekend serves the fruit the safe way without needing to be told twice.