Electric fence will work just fine, they use it in Austrailia to keep dingos out, and it works at my ranch to keep my dogs in and coyotes out, the trick is to run two strands, one ground wire about 3-4 inches off the ground and a hot wire 10-12 inches off the ground, use and 8 ft grounding rod and a 1 joule charger you will keep dogs contained. I would also run a hot wire along the top to keep horses from rubbing, and critters from climbing. way cheaper, easier, and cleaner looking in my mind.
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Chicken wire is crap if you have to trim around it. I got no climb fence and stapled it to the top and bottom boards of my three board fence, plus used some heavy duty zip ties in a few problem areas with hills. Keeps my goats in and dogs out. No issues with turning the pony out either.
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We tackled the first 200’ today, the place where the dogs most often enter. The horses don’t have access to this part so we attached Red Brand 12.5-gauge woven wire field fence to the post side as suggested. The fence cost about 71 cents per linear foot, as opposed to $2 per linear foot for DIY 2”x4” horse mesh or $6.50 per linear foot to have my fence guy install 2”x4” horse mesh plus hemlock face boards. I think it looks fine and nobody sees it up close regularly anyway. We still need to add more staples but my hammering arm was done for the day and I had a jumping lesson to get to. Would face boards add significantly to the security/durability of the fence or are they mostly for appearances? Everywhere I drive now I see overgrown, falling down mesh fence and I don’t want mine to look like that!
I definitely don’t want to do the horse-accessible portions with the mesh on the post side because it leaves awkward gaps and I would worry about them getting hung up somehow. So I’ll have to do more thinking but at least one part is done!
(Cheapskate fence stretcher
)
ETA: To add insult to the financial injury of having to fence out inconsiderate neighbors’ dogs, within 5 min of starting I stepped in some of said dogs’ poo and had to smell it for the rest of the project. 
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We have a fence stretcher just like yours, boards and bolts grey and weathered now, a good 75+ years old!
It still works fine. 
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Your field fence won’t sag if the posts don’t lean, it’s braced every 100 ft and you tensioned it tight enough.
My neighbor’s field fence is 3 decades old and still tight. She has hot wire on the top of hers to keep horses off it, but in your section with no horse access it should be fine.
I see what you mean about the horse section. With the boards on the outside and wire on the inside that leaves a gap. Are your boards nailed or screwed up? If screws, I might pull the boards, run the wire on the outside and then re screw boards.
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Sadly they’re nailed and I must suck at pulling boards because the few times I’ve had to do it they always split. If they were screwed on it would be a no-brainer for me.
It’s not just you. I can’t pull a nailed on board w out wrecking the board either.
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Thinking out loud a little here…. I could cut the horse-accessible portion of the perimeter fence down from 500+ feet to about 230 feet if I attached field fence to the post side of an old 3-board fence that runs parallel to the horse fence.
The reason I didn’t initially consider this is I’d have to connect the section we tackled yesterday to that old 3-board fence with a 155-foot section of new field fence, including two gates. But that plan would make another 160 feet a reasonable DIY project like yesterday’s so maybe it would even out… Hmm.
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Ugh, hitting some snags here. My fence guy isn’t available until June. Also I chatted with a lawyer about how to handle the falling-down fence that we think is right on the shared property line, and I’m now even more confused about how to handle that. Some of his advice contradicted what I found online about fence law in my state, which admittedly is nebulous because it’s not statutory.
we put up a new fence 10 feet inside the property line because neighbor was not going to help with repairs on the common fence . … his horses were destroying the fence
Afterwards when his horses breached the common fence I just called animal control to have them removed… after two times he then built his own new fence.
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That’s pretty similar to what my parents did at their place.
Yes that’s what I wanted to do (build a fence on our side). But in our state it seems we might still be financially responsible for maintenance of the fence on the property line even if we build our own. Though the lawyer didn’t seem to think so but still didn’t advise building the fence. We have also already called AC way more than twice, and gone to court, and it still keeps happening, so……
Oh dang.
That’s frustrating
I was willing to split the cost of repair or replace the common fence, other guy just was was just a big jerk (his wife was more so)… so when their horses stepped onto my property I just called animal control. First call they got Mr Jerk to cut down some of the fence to get their horses back onto their property, second time animal control impounded the two horses, cost him some dollars to get them back. Then he and his wife built a new fence.
A few years later they divorced, sold the place to settle the divorce.
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There is nothing wrong with that stretcher!
I learned this week that if I bait my ‘dog height’ hot fence to keep my dogs INside of my horse fence, they will zap their little snouts trying to get said hotwired dog treat 
and run backwards, yelping, horrified of said fence line.
So- you might (so the dogs are horrified and never ever come back)— set up a temporary hot wire on the oustide/the BOARD side of your fence, and make it dog tempting with a goodie wired to the fence. They will find it, get the snot zapped out of them, and likely learn that this fence is the devil and must be avoided 
Then you take down your tacky dog zapper and go about your businsess.
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We made our own and it looks just like that and works great. Anytime you can save a buck and use what you have on hand, you shouldn’t apologize for it!!
I think your fencing looks just fine and it will keep the neighbors dogs out. That is the important thing. Too bad the neighbors can’t / won’t keep their dogs at home 
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Get a survey of the line. If it is a shared fenceline, build your own right at the fenceline - just inside the old fence. If it is not a shared fence, whosever side it is on determines your action. If its yours, take it down and build a new fence. If it is neighbors, ignore it. Build your own.
The survey is key.
I am late to this thread but wanted to say that we have a pasture that borders part of our back yard and we put woven wire fence on the back side of the pasture fence (which faces the yard). It looks fine - it’s pretty unobtrusive as your eye mainly sees the board fence unless you are looking hard. We did this to fence our backyard for the dogs, as they don’t have a bit of sense around the horses.
