Here's what I posted yesterday, an out-of-scale drawing of where the horses live:
The red pipe fence is fine, I don't think they could damage that if they tried.
Here's a new drawing.
The areas bordered in pink are high priority, that's where they usually live. They always have access to the corrals, and if any of the two far pastures are open, then they also have access to the front pasture. The area bordered in green is middle priority, they don't live there as often as the pink area. The yellow pasture is low priority, they don't live there more than a few months during the year, and that is my riding arena so I think I'd just as soon not have that one be "hot," at least not unless needed.
4 comments:
I really hate hot wires. They work, but I'm always running into them myself. If you do put up a wire, don't put it along the top of the fence, it needs to be at about chest and butt height (on the horse, obviously). If you have a gate connector on each of the outlying pastures, you can easily disconnect those parts when not in use, which gives you a better charge on the ones that ARE being used. Do a really good job of securing the tape when you first put it up. Don't put horses in a wired enclosure when the wire isn't on, it will get pulled down and often wraps around a leg or something. DO put in connector points where you can unhook the wires in a hurry so you don't need to go clear back to the barn and turn it off to make emergency repairs. And here's something you might consider: put a couple of big posts in concrete out in the middle of those pens so the girls can scratch themselves legally. Sort of like what they do with cows. Hey, you could put a swivel thing on top of the pole, hook up a horse on a lunge line, then sit there in your chair and pop the whip. Put an umbrella on the post, too, so you'll be in the shade. Give me a day or two, and I'm sure I'll have more great ideas.
I'm not wild about it either, it brings back memories of childhood and cow pastures and being SO SCARED of the hot wire. But, I think it's becoming necessary, and probably should have been done years ago! You know, they don't actually scratch on the posts very much. I mean, they can do whatever they want to the corral pipe fence, but they don't. It's the wire they like! Maybe I need to put two posts and a section of wire out in the pasture for them to lean on legally!
Hire some little girls to scratch them for a couple of hours a day?
I like Jan's second idea. -BM
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