Navigating Animal Ageing: Liminal Spaces, Horse–Human Relationships, and the Care of Ageing Companions

The recently emerged spaces of horse retirement yards aim to provide ageing horses a chance for a good retirement. In these particular equine spaces, animal ageing is situationally experienced, managed, and interpreted within horse–human relational networks. In this chapter, we explore the construction of the category of animal retirement and its use within the life course of a horse. The analysis draws on interviews with horse retirement yard managers in the UK and focuses on how retirement yards can be understood as liminal spaces of transition and transformation. We particularly investigate the ways in which the yard manager is able to negotiate the figurative and bodily processes of equine ageing and to communicate them to the distant owner of the horse. We pay special attention to the careful balancing of re-wilding and domestication within the practices of equine care, finding them to be essential for producing dwelling-in-retirement on a horse retirement yard and thus in turn, realise the potential for successful ageing.