09/23/2025
I retired a very good polo horse at age 16. While some can play into their 20s, this horse was showing the strain of the quick hard stops with a rollback that the game of polo demands of a horse's hocks. Anybody could ride this horse, and he was a favorite of my kids, so he stayed at the farm. I had a BHS Pony Club then, and I leased this horse to new D1 and D2 Pony Clubbers until he died at age 34.
My advice for older horse owners is to give them a job. Just as it is with humans, the body has to move if it is going to be comfortable into the senior years. The more the horse has done, the more likely it has experienced injuries of several kinds. As a horse ages, those injuries, however small, turn into increasingly ouchy or painful daily struggles. Scar tissue hardens and makes movement more difficult. That tissue needs to stretch to stay supple. Arthritis and various levels of bone calcification can increase low pain into discomfort. Joints need to be kept as fluid as possible.
You can call the vet and get a rundown of what the senior horse is experiencing and why, but when a horse gets past their 20s I don't bother with a diagnosis when I can feel the pain and its location in a horse. I treat the pain, not worrying what the source might be, and I keep older horses moving.
There is a simple rule with injured horses, "When you work them, they either get better or worse." Most older horses get better with work. If they get worse, you have to stop and rethink it.
It is possible to raise an older horse's threshold of pain with regular movement. It's hell getting old no matter if it's a horse or a person. Movement can be painful, but not moving results in a growing intensity of pain until the body just doesn't want to move.
My go to treatment for aging ouchy horses is Glucosamine in their daily feed and Bute before every ride. Some people believe that Bute will irritate the stomach lining and put a horse off their feed. But back in the 80s Cornell Vet School did a study that found this was generally a myth. They might be off their feed from the pain and not from Bute issues.
Another technique I learned is to put an older horse in the pasture with a controlling pony mare that won't let a horse stand still for very long. This works well with colicly horses too. I say pony because they don't eat much and get the job done. I highly recommend cranky POA mares for the job.
I know many horse owners' approach with an aging horse is to feel "they deserve an easy retirement" and they do nothing with an older horse but watch them graze in a field. I think this is a mistake.
Another adjustment we must make as horses age in their senior years is their feed. Teeth can become less efficient, and guts can slow down. Exercise helps with some of these issues, but feed adjustments must be part of the picture. Fortunately, the most recent advancements in horsemanship have been in nutrition and we now have many more solutions than in the past. Do your research.
Another trick I learned to keep horses feeling young is to take an older horse along to something they used to do. As the older polo horse I mentioned aged, once in a while I'd load him up with the other polo horses and take him to a game. He'd stand in the line of horses tied to the trailer where he could hear the announcer, the crack of a ball being hit and experience the typical game day activity around the trailer. I swear, every time I did this, he looked ten years younger.
What methods have you discovered to help an aging horse?
