Barefoot vs. Shoes

Imagine your horse without flesh, just bones. At the bottom of his leg, there are the bones that go inside of his hoof capsule. These have only very slight differences from horse to horse, just as their other bones do.

The hoof is supposed to grow down based on the angles of these bones, in particular, the coffin bone. A good corrective trimmer will remove the forces that deform the hoof capsule so the hoof can grow down in its proper shape. The problems in our hooves are due to trimmers and farriers not understanding hoof anatomy and how hooves grow and are deformed. Because of this, they attempt to fix problems by applying shims and cutting things off here and there instead of attempting to grow a hoof capsule all the way down from the coronary band that fits tightly over the inner foot.

Regarding wearing out boots... In my experience, metal shoes have worn out far faster for me than my Old Macs. Conservative calculations has over 3000 trail miles logged on my G1 Old Macs before some relatively minor fraying of the soft parts occured. The trail horses I used to work on snapped shoes right across the fronts on a regular basis, before their feet could grow out of a 4 week trim.
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That is what it looks like here and worse. Most of the places we ride everybody is steel shod. You might come across a person here or there that uses boots but steel shoes are definitely more popular. I am going to have to look into the pour in pads you mentioned earlier cause those would definitely be helpful in some situations.

On a good weekend we can wear the nail heads right off our shoes and have to turn around and reshoe. My farrier fusses, ALOT. He came out two weekends before christmas and we headed to cataloochee and we we came back he had to come back out and reshoe both our horses because my mare only had two nails holding her shoe on on the right front and barely three nails in the other shoe. All the other ones the nails heads where completely stripped off. The boots can get more miles without being destroyed.

My mustang has never been shod, and I don't plan on it ever. The same for the other two horses in my care.
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I wouldn't expect a mustang that came from the wild to ever require shoes of any sort, unless there was a severe injury or some other sort of hoof damage.

My mare is an ex-racehorse that was once shod.
When we got her, her feet were in a terrible condition - the previous owner had done the hoof trimming himself - she had about 6 months of cracked hooves and continual abcesses until we found our current farrier and he's worked a miracle.
No shoes, nice hooves (he said for what we will be doing with her - 10-15 miles soft riding a week) we've no need for shoes and unless it was a medical requirement, I wouldn't have them.
At the moment, she's in foal and he's left her feet a little flatter that usual to distribut the weight as she's not a big frame usually and seems to be carrying an elephant! But on his next trip (when baby should have arrived), he;ll start to reshape her hooves again. But none of her feet look the same - but that's just her - and he shapes her hooves to fit her, not to look the same.........
But we have NO TERRAIN like the ones shown above - just green fields and tarmacked roads and the off bridle path which is just gavelly mud! I;d love to be able to ride in the landscapes like you are

(jealous much - who me?)

Bleu isn't from the wild. He was born on a ranch.
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That's what people think but I have owned 5 mustangs (all born in the wild) .... 2 had great feet, one was pretty good, one was just ok and the last one actually has pretty bad hooves imo. In the wild their lifestyle promotes healthy hooves, but once they are in captivity and confined to a corral/pasture they are pretty much like any other horse.

So did you have to put shoes on one of your mustangs? I would never expect a mustang in captivity to not ever need a trim or anything like that, but I would think that if you kept up with a natural trim that the hoof would more or less be maintained at it's natural state.