Horses Chewing Fence Rails

[cowboydoc]

Mike,
Save your money those products only work for a couple days at best. I've tryed it all and you're just as well off to put diesel fuel in sprayer and spray it on there. It works as well as anything. The other guys have given you some permant fixes. The other thing that works well is to run a strand of hotwire across the top board to get them to leave it alone. Once they start chewing wood though there isn't much that will stop them. That's another reason I will never have wood fences with horses.

 

[radman]

This can be a tough problem. I have tried used motor oil and it will work for some horses. Need to reapply the oil occassionally. An electric fence wire will work very well, esp if just need to protect a single rail. Metal edging also works very well. The idea of using drywall edging is interesting and probably the cheapest.

 

[jb112454]

hi mike, replace your wood fences with metal pipe, cable or electro brad any thing but wood. when wood breaks it spilnters and could hurt the horses. a barbless wire is cheap with caps on the t posts that's what i have on my 80./w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[TonyC]

My neighbor has about 15 horses and has tried everything with little luck. I suggested a shotgun which I am sure would work but they decided against it./w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[jyoutz]

I have tried 2 solutions, with fair to great success. 1) coat the wood with used motor oil. This will make a nice brown stain and will also preserve the wood (downside -this is messy until the oil is absorbed into the wood and fully dried). 2) face the board edge with steel drywall corner edging. These are cheap and easy to nail onto the board. They don't look bad either.

 

[jyoutz]

They can tear up the drywall edging but only if it is loose or can be pryed loose. I make sure that can't happen by running a thin bead of liquid nails on each inside surface of the drywall edging before I install it. Also, I've lately I started using screws instead of nails. No problems with them chewing this at all.

 

[MikePA]

Would you be able to post a picture of your drywall edging in place on the fence?

 

[RPM]

If you use motor oil on the fence, does anybody know which is better - regular or synthetic? /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

 

[hayes]

We just went through the same problem. We have 2 pastures with a PT fence between them. The new horse was on one side and the other horses on the other side. This was there
congregation point. Two of them nearly ate through the top
board. Our solution was to turn them out together. If we could not have done that then we would have put a strand of hot wire across the top. Once they get shocked by that they usually stay away from it.

(Before the PT fence went up we had a electic fence up, each horse got shocked once and never touched it again.)

Larry

 

[jyoutz]

I'm embarrassed to say that I'm way behind the techno-times and have no digital camera. Basically I just "glue and screw" the drywall edging to an upper board edge. As long as the metal strip is glued tight to the board (liquid nails) the horses don't try to mess with it. Back when I first tried this method, I just nailed the strip to the board. Sometimes the strip would work loose and then the animals start pulling the strips off the board. No problems with liquid nails.