My 24 y/o gelding appears to be marking his territory since we brought home our mini gelding. I’ve never seen the senior horse do this, even when he lived with another gelding years ago. Now when I open the stalls into their pasture, my senior guy walks into the mini’s stall, sniffs all of his pee and manure and pees on each spot. I just watched him sniff and pee 5 times in a row all around the stall.
What is this? I’ve never seen this behavior before.
My gelding was around nineteen, had been in pasture for over a decade (several different pastures over the years). Then I got my own land that may have never had a horse living on it.
The first time I turned him out he started marking the new paddock, he’d mark (pee), wander a little, mark again, and on and on. After the first day he did not do it any more even when we made new paddocks for the horses and moved them to different parts of my land. None of my other horses did this. At that time he was the oldest horse in the small herd.
Over the years several of mine have done this. I would interpret it as the gelding making a point to the mini. Along the lines of “I am the boss of you”.
I’ve got this going on with my two old geldings. One is dominant and tries to bury or cover the others poop by digging. He’s also started kicking at him while they are in their stalls. They are males even if the gear won’t work.
This is so interesting - I didn’t realize horses would do this. The mini seems to be a bit more in charge. He protects food when it’s down and will give warning kicks to the senior horse. I’ve never seen my horse offer to kick the mini, but he does chomp at the air in his direction quite a bit. Maybe this is part of them figuring out their place with each other.
Our two mini donkey jacks do this. And they are best buds. I love it - makes for easy clean up of manure piles around their paddock!
So while I would say it is in the category of dominance behaviors, it’s not all that uncommon for even castrated males to do and I’d say it’s almost - IME - more common for the less-dominant equine to do because it’s one of the few things they can do without retribution that establishes their territory and dominance.
One of my minis does something like this. It is a part of his daily routine when fist turned out each day. He pees in a variety of spots, usually where he eats 
and also demolishes any pile of manure left by the other mini. He will strike and stomp the pile into bits, then turn around and poop on it. It is like he HAS to have the last word and that is the only way he can get his point across.
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