add the vertical board suggested in the first response.
add a strand of hot wire on the inside, roughly halfway between the top board and second board down from the top. I agree that wire is best for this, not tape. Solar chargers are your friend, spring for the expensive Parmak charger, they work forever.
The OP says she already has facer boards.
Mybe attach the facer boards more securely than whatever is now in use.
Since the OP didn’t mention electric, they may be like me - no thank you. I’ve known too many nasty accidents with electric and would rather not use it.
Add electric or 2x4 no climb to the inside. 2x4 has a slight advantage of potentially keeping neighhood dogs out of your fields.
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I appreciate all the helpful feedback from everybody. Fence guy today asked, high tensile wire, or that white woven cord? I have some experience with the white cord stuff. No experience with the wire but my knee jerk said wire might be more injurious to the horse. What is this group’s consensus? (Fence guy recommended the wire; he’s not a horse person but he’s done fencing of all types forever, FWIW)
The electric wire is not “high tensile” wire. It’s not super strong wire… either the aluminium stuff, or the steel stuff. It breaks if it has to. The nylon/plastic type stuff does NOT break… but the tiny wires woven into it DO break, so after a while it does not carry the charge well, or at all. The metal wire will carry the charge through bushes and branches touching the wire. It’s the better choice IMO. I have used both here, and have replaced some or most of the nylon/plastic stuff with metal wire over the years. You need to use the wider tape IF you need to make sure that the horses can see it, but I don’t think that this is an issue in your situation. Just use either aluminium or steel electric fence wire.
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A lot of time pastures share a fence-line, so of course horses go out in fields with the boards “on the wrong side” pretty regularly.
The vertical face board is a solution.
Or run electric on the inside.
Both super reasonable remedies.
Adding a second layer of boards on the other side of the fence is an intriguing, albeit expensive, idea.
For electric, I prefer polyrope.
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Don’t use high tensile, it’s too strong. Go to tractor supply or the like and look at the rolls of hot wire. It’s flimsy by design. It’ll break and won’t hurt a horse.
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Right, just so everyone knows what we’re talking about, it sounds like the fencing guy is talking about high tensile, but everybody here who prefers wire to poly rope has been talking about weaker, hopefully safer wire.
I know I used 14 gauge steel “Silverod” wire here 30-40 years ago, and still see it in catalogs. Moose and bear broke it regularly (off-season when it was not powered) so I assume it would give if a horse hit it. Of course I was not on scene to see what the wildlife looked like after the encounter.
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A horse might bounce off a board placed on the inside or the outside of the post.
A horse might go through a board placed on the inside or the outside of a post. A board on the outside of a post is more likely to pop off as opposed to break in half and stab a horse to death like a board on the inside of the post if a horse hits it with enough pressure. In both scenarios, the horse is out of the fence.
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To be clear; I personally like hot tape added to no climb as a fence over board fencing regardless of how the boards are attached to the posts. All board fences at my farm are for look / sight rail only. If I was OP, I’d run a line of hot tape at the top board where it wouldn’t show from the outside of the fence.
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This is my suggestion as well.
Popping a board off is far easier than breaking a board. But either way, if the horse pops a board or hits one hard enough to break it, you’ve got yourself a probably dead horse from being hit on the road, and all the liability nightmare that goes with whatever damage the loose horse did to vehicles and people.
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I think your choices partly depend on the location of the fences and the surrounding area.
If the fence is along a busy road, or would allow horse to get out to the road, you might choose the stronger options. The risk of a horse getting out would outweigh the risk of a horse hitting the fence.
If the fence is between paddocks, or within another fenced area, you can choose a fence that will break with less chance of injury since the loose horse is still in a safe area.
Of course you can have both kinds of fence. My favorite was no climb on the board fence facing the road and driveway (helped keep kids and some wildlife out). And three strand electric dividing the paddocks.
Two horse people, a minimum of 3 opinions. One of my opinions is that boards on the outside of the post is correct.
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And also what kind of board fencing is a factor. How old is the wood? Was it nailed or screwed? How thick are the boards? What type of wood? Is there a face board at each post? All of these are also factors in determining the strength and safety of a fence.
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OP, adding an electric wire is something that you can easily to yourself, even if you feel that you are not an experienced fence builder. You do not need to employ someone to do this job for you. The plastic insulators are cheap to buy, and there are a variety of them. I like the Black Widow ones the best, they are the toughest. They just tap in with a hammer, comes with suitable nails in the bag. I take a wrap around the core of the insulator every few stretches of the line, so that if a deer breaks the wire, it doesn’t take the whole business down… just breaks between the anchored insulators. If this happens, it’s easy to fix. Either the wire has stretched enough with the deer’s breaking it that you can just wrap the ends together, or you can easily add a short piece of wire between the two broken ends. Just do what you have to to keep it tight. Shut the electrical ticker box OFF before doing this LOL. The solar powered ticker boxes are GREAT. Highly recommended. You need a ground post hammered into the ground at the location of the box, and a ground wire from that post to the box. Then your charged wire leaves the box from the other other post.The box will come with instructions on how to install. Don’t pay someone to do this job for you (unless you are OK flushing money down the toilet- some rich people are OK with doing this). This is a job you can do yourself. What scares me is that your fence builder is talking “high tensile” wire for an electric fence. Not recommended.
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I may not have gotten his verbiage right–he said that he proposed metal wire that would be pulled tight, and emphasized that he could get better tension that way than the white rope kind. I may have converted his tension comment to “tensile” in my head.
I wish I had time to do the project myself but have to rely on people to help. Additionally, there are a few areas where I need the fence guy to add posts and boards, and a few gates, so make sure we have a secure envelope to where if a horse ever pulled away from someone going to and from the pasture, they can’t leave the barnyard. I am puzzled how the prior people laid out their paddocks. You have to walk a long ways from barn to gates, and if a horse did pull away, they would easily be headed towards a road, or neighbors’ property.
At our other nearby location, we don’t have any of these issues and luckily have never had an injury with horses hitting boards that are on the interior of the posts. It’s laid out to where you can turn out directly from the barn to several different pastures. It’s double fenced in the critical spots and the trees lines are such that you get some enhanced natural barriers beyond the fences. New place has me nervous but I appreciate all the good suggestions here.
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Well, fences are not forever and time flies, so even if you do not make any changes now, you can be assured that it will all need to be replaced sooner than later (when you can least afford it usually) and you can make changes at that time. Nothing is permanent with horses!
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What kind of problems? Were they problems due to the use of high tensile wire, or due to electricity and electric wire. Those are two very different things.
