When a horse ages to its senior years, its flexibility and strength start to fade. However, you, as an owner, can take steps to keep your older horse healthy, happy, and as comfortable as possible by using these senior horse care tips.
Caring for a senior horse
Getting older is a natural part of life for all of us, humans, and animals alike. It’s not fun, it’s not easy but it is something that we all have to do. Along with flexibility and strength fading, we are not able to handle infections or stress near as well. Horses have the same problem.
Exercise and almost any kind of activity become less fun and more of a painful chore. Things like broken bones take longer to heal and illnesses can be much more serious in seniors.
Different breeds of horses age differently but normally, horses aged twenty and older are considered senior horses even if some of them don’t start to show aging until well after twenty-five.
Even if your horse is a senior horse, it is best to keep them outside and moving, keeping the joints from getting stiff. Horses love to exercise and gallop through pastures. This is fine for a senior horse as long as the exercise is not too strenuous.
Keeping records as a base line
Make sure that you keep a record of your horse’s normal temperature, pulse, & respiration. Also, write down his weight and the condition of his body on a one through nine scale.
This way, later when checking all of these statistics about your horse, you have a baseline to go off of and see what has changed and by how much.
I advise checking these things in your horse once a month. If you see your horse on an everyday basis, you might not notice the change if it’s a gradual thing. So, check his numbers monthly. Discuss any changes with your vet. If there is a significant change, your vet can tell you how best to handle the situation.
Arrange routine checkups
Senior horses need a yearly checkup. This needs to include an oral exam too. Normally a horse’s teeth will last him all of his life. But, if your horse is very old, he may have some teeth that have eroded some over time and can be causing him pain and making it difficult for him to chew his food. Just like an adult with a tooth in that condition, once it has been pulled, the pain will go away, putting your horse in more comfort.
Senior horse care will include more frequent checkups as your horse gets older. Discuss this with your vet. In between checkups if a problem occurs, call your vet.
As your horse ages, there may be surgeries or treatments that will be required. You will have to ask yourself the difficult question of, “Are the benefits of the surgery worth what it will cost?”.
Many times, like with horse colic, owners think that it will do more harm than good or that it won’t help enough to justify the cost. This is not usually the case. Normally, an older horse will do just as well as a younger horse with colic surgery.
Keep an eye on weight
Horses, just like us, tend to lose muscle as they age, gaining fat instead. There are two reasons why this can be a problem.
Senior horses often have some form of arthritis. Having extra weight on them makes them even more uncomfortable and can cause them severe pain. A horse’s body score number should always be between five and seven. Extra weight will start to affect the horse’s knees, making it extremely painful for him to walk.
As your horse ages, he will become more insulin resistant. The reduction in the sensibility to insulin will reduce his ability to absorb glucose. This is close to the type 2 diabetes that humans deal with.
Exercise power
Senior horse care also includes exercise. But once your horse reaches the age of twenty, his stroke volume and his maximal heart rate start to decrease which makes his cardiac output much lower.
Due to this, you will need to be extremely careful if you exercise him in hot temperatures. Just like with a human, the heart has to work harder the hotter the temperature is.
So, although your horse does need exercise, do not overdo it in the heat.
Immunity in a senior horse
A senior horse’s immune system also diminishes with age. His immunity doesn’t respond to infections the way it did when he was younger. His chance of getting an infection may be lower since he isn’t traveling to shows and other places as much but if you are bringing in other horses, they can bring in infections.
Vaccines do not work as well or last as long with senior horses. So, keep that in mind when bringing in new arrivals.
Deworming a senior horse
Your horse shouldn’t need to be dewormed in the wintertime. Parasites are not present during the very cold weather. However, when the soil is wet and warm you may need to deworm but before doing so, you need to find out exactly what kind of parasite is present and give the correct deworming medication.
Senior horse nutrition
Senior horses need different diets. It all depends on the horse himself, the condition of the horse’s teeth, whether it has a laminitis problem, and other issues that need to be considered.
A horse with dental problems may need to have processed food or prechewed food to keep him from choking and to make sure that the nutrients in the food are easily accessible.
Comfort
For senior horse care and comfort, using joint health supplements are great to use – as long as you get them from your vet.
A non-steroid, anti-inflammatory can be used though it might be hard on your horse’s stomach. But if it makes your horse hurt less and be more comfortable, it just may be worth it.
Don’t count out exercise. A slow, easy exercise, just enough to work the joints, may be what is needed to provide comfort to your horse.
Conclusion
Horses can live for a very long time if you remember to get his checkups regularly, always be on the lookout for changes in his body and attitude, keep in contact with your vet, and if your horse just doesn’t seem to be himself, call the vet in.
Taking time to do some extra senior horse care activities can help his comfort levels, however when your senior horse isn’t behaving normally or looking normal, then something is wrong and it’s time to find out what the problem is.