I’ve been caring for older horses for quite a while now. From my family’s aging herd, to the dozens of seniors at the farm I once worked at, to my own 19-year-old Thoroughbred gelding Dorado, I’ve pretty much been there and done it. But every now and then, regardless of what I know and what I’ve experienced, I have something of a revelation. Something that I’ve been dealing with for years might finally just sink in and I finally accept (sometimes begrudgingly) that I can’t change it, for good or not.

I’ve had several of these revelations over the past few months. Here are just a few:

Some older geldings still firmly believe they’re stallions. And Dorado is one of those horses. Any time he’s allowed to “talk” to a mareÑespecially one in heatÑover the fence, he turns into a big, wild “stallion,” screaming his head off constantly and focusing all his attention on that mare; he’s actually harder to deal with in this state than most stallions I know. And regardless of how many times the object of his attention ignores his “advances” or attempts to beat him up if they’re in the same field, he still is convinced he must be a stallion and be with that mare at all times. Oh DÉ