From range rules to paddock rules
Everything that made your mustang extraordinary on the range quietly reverses in domestic old age. Hooves that stayed short and balanced across miles of abrasive ground now grow unchecked on soft pasture, walking a fraction of the distance. A metabolism tuned to sparse bunchgrass and long walks between water now meets measured hay, sweet feed, and a trough twenty steps away. And a body hardened by a hard early life may carry old injuries and wear that only declare themselves as arthritis in his teens and twenties. Senior care for a mustang is therefore translation work: keeping the toughness, replacing the conditions that maintained it, and watching for the places where the domestic version falls short of the wild one.
Feet: the first domestic bill
The classic mustang foot — thick-walled, dense, self-shaped — earns its reputation honestly, but self-trimming was mileage, not magic. In a paddock he needs a farrier on a regular cycle like any domestic horse, and the change surprises owners whose young mustang genuinely never needed one. Overgrowth alters his angles and strains joints already worn by range life; cracks appear in walls that never cracked before. Prepare him for the work as you would have at gentling: short, calm sessions, feet handled daily in the weeks before a visit, and a farrier warned that this horse's cooperation is real but earned. Many ageing mustangs go happily barefoot for life in domestic work — the point is the schedule, not the shoe.
Feeding a horse built for scarcity
A mustang's genius is extraction: he pulls a living from forage a pampered breed would starve on, which means domestic abundance is his metabolic enemy. Obesity, a cresty neck, and pasture laminitis are the standing risks of the retired mustang, all preventable with range logic applied domestically — measured hay of moderate quality rather than rich bales fed free-choice, limited time on lush pasture, a plain mineral source, and his condition judged by ribs felt under the winter coat rather than by whether he finished his feed; he will always finish his feed. Slow-feeding nets suit him well, stretching a ration across the hours his ancestors spent walking and grazing. If he is losing condition in true old age, look first to his teeth — years of coarse, sandy forage wear molars hard — before simply feeding more.
Trust, handling and the older wild heart
However many years he has lived with people, an ageing mustang's instincts were written early and deep. Vet and farrier visits go best planned the way gentling was: quiet, unhurried, with escape routes he can see and handlers he already knows, and with any new procedure introduced in short practices beforehand rather than sprung on him in a crisis. Watch for the senior mustang's particular stiffness pattern — cold mornings, hard ground after rain, the first minutes out of the stable — and answer it with turnout and movement rather than confinement. His records are the final translation: a horse whose early life left no paperwork gets his whole documented history — trims, weights, vaccinations, vet findings — built deliberately in his KinsLe Pet Passport, so the second half of his life is as well evidenced as the first half was wild.