No kidding. Just like elementary school kids.
No, horses understand the hotwire. They know where it is. Do you disagree?
This incident wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
I sincerely hope you weren’t hurt, but the mental image that gives me… 
Also adding:
One of my first experiences living on my farm was hearing hoofbeats running past & worrying my 2 had gotten loose.
Nope, it was 3 horses runniing hell-bent for leather across my lawns.
With my 2 racing them from inside my pastures 
Next came 2 kids on ATVs, who somehow managed to turn the runaways & herd them back wherever they came from.
Friends had 6 horses, including a pair of Belgians.
Husband had the team out for a drive, wife heard hoofbeats & looked out her LR window to see the other 4 leaving the property.
SOMEONE(DH) had left a gate undone.
She was getting in the truck to go after the escapees, when here they came, galloping back into the pasture through the still-open gate.
Seems DH had been returning with the team when the rest spotted him, turned & fled back home. BUSTED!
Above simultaneously proves & disproves OP’s theory of Free Grazing.
Schrodinger’s Horses? 
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Glad you and he weren’t hurt. But aww, teeny baby turkeys at eye level.
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But they do leave their herds. All. Of. The. Time.
In my near half-century with horses, I’ve had friends with horses who left show grounds & their herd of friends and galloped several miles before stopping, a horse who left a show (and, again, all of its friends) and was found the next morning at another random barn several miles away, a horse who left a pasture of friends and all the lush grass he could imagine to go galloping around the neighborhood, a pony that skipped its herd and was hit by a car, several who have gotten out of their herd-filled pastures and made a break for it because well, you know, the grass is always greener down the road….and on and on.
Proclaiming that something doesn’t happen does not make it factually correct. It hasn’t happened to you yet - another reason to be grateful! - but that does not mean that it doesn’t happen.
As I’m typing this I’m realizing that the definition of insanity is this … expecting you to come to your senses with repeated explanations of rational thought.
The whack-a-mole is spot on, @Pocket_Rocket
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JLu, at this point most of the posters are enjoying telling stories of times equine behavior doesn’t follow expected protocols. You could also just enjoy the stories and the reminiscing but instead you keep arguing. In my father’s words, it’s time to set the shovel down.
Speaking of turkeys, I have a wonderful gelding who does his level best when spooking to try to avoid me. I was longing him one day in the indoor when he was 5, when the two farm turkeys decided to pop their heads up to try to eat the little decorative pumpkins growing on the back gate. He dropped like a cutting horse, literally went from 16h to about two feet tall and spun hard but thankfully had the presence of mind to not flatten me. He earned a lot of points that day because I was definitely in his way and could have very much become an Alterration-pancake.
What made me laugh was the scene afterward. The turkeys weird little curious faces and his loud dragon snorts as I tried to restart my heart! Friggen turkeys!
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Beautifully said.
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They’re not “my” mean girls, I don’t know a single person on this thread aside from this board 
your (frequently unreasonable) opinion =/= facts. I know there’s no point in trying to reason with crazy, and this thread would absolutely die if you stopped coming back and incoherently rage posting.
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Here’s Tristan Tucker doing some of that magical training. (I think we all could use something of a laugh.)
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Thank you for that, I literally laughed out loud!!
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IME baby turkeys are way more scary to horses than adult turkeys, precisely because they are hard to see.
Goslings are also scary. Especially when they are plopping, one by one, from a short rise into the water. Feronia was Not Amused. (Then again, she thinks birds swimming around in the water might be bears.)
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Hehehe. You had a rodeo on your lawn and it even including a couple of cowboy kiddos. I can picture this!
I did get banged up pretty bad when the mini flipped out. I ended up with my entire butt black and blue and the bruising went from back to front, covering my girly bits. I hit my head hard, and I may have had a slight concussion, although I was too stupid to even think about getting checked out at the time. I had mood swings for a few days and I was just NQR I but didn’t put 2 and 2 together (and that in itself was not me).
For us, it’s the ruffed grouse. They wait until you are Right.On.Top of them before sputtering off half-flapping, half-running, half-flying. My saintly mare has levitated sideways when a grouse decides to explode under her feet.
This winter, a mega-turkey flock has formed in the woods around our farm- last week I counted over 50 of them traveling together. Most of the year, they move in much smaller flocks of 3-4, except when the 3-4 have a good year for babies and then the flock balloons up closer to 20. I love the awkward teenagers and their little trills and whistles. The flocks cross my pasture all the time so the horses don’t tend to be too bothered by them, even when we see them out on trail in the woods.
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Why is the insight and experiences of others discounted as BS? Why are you willing to argue and sneer as opposed to sharing ideas and insight? Why is everyone else wrong and you are right?
Pookie can and will wander away from a herd. I have seen it happen many times. And I understand horse behavior very well - as in, they can still be individuals and not all of the same Borg mind despite their fight or flight (mainly flight) tendencies. Very few horses have attended clinics and watched videos and read books that say they will never do that.
I really do not think you know how you are coming across… set that shovel down.
Another example:
We have a retired ex-show champion mini stallion here. He has upon a few occasions in the past 20 years managed to get out of his luxurious runout with ample grazing - and take off down the driveway. Away from the mares. He crosses a lush lawn without a thought about enjoying it - and goes straight to the much bigger bay stallion’s paddock along the bend on the driveway. He commences to challenge him - from the outside of the fence (he is no fool) and out of the reach of the enraged bay. The neighbors must think that velociraptors are battling. When approached and busted, the snotty little ginger flags his tail and does his big show trot away from the stallion… and the mares… and the grass… and heads out down the driveway. He knows that mares and grass are the other direction. Fortunately, the gate at the far end is usually shut and his caper comes to an end. But there was the time an Amazon van was coming in as The Ginger (I am sure he thinks of himself like The Black) was heading out - and he just merrily squeezed past the van (4 plank fencing on both sides of the driveway and about 3 feet of hedged clearance on each side) and LEFT.
We caught him on the trail leading into the nearby nature preserve… sauntering along with a couple of bemused riders and their patient geldings. He is 31 this year - and still feisty!
Bottom line - in breeding and foaling, we say that the most predictable thing about a mare is her unpredictability. Mares have not read the books that tell them they must do A, B & C at specific times. They do not care. They are individuals. Horses in general are exactly the same way…
We did have a free grazer for almost 13 years. A small silver black dwarf mini who came and went as he pleased. He could not be in with the other horses… so had his own kingdom. He was a lawn ornament. He loved to stand at the bend in the driveway and stare down incoming vehicles. Regular visitors knew just to get out, turn him around, tap him on the butt and tell Cowboy to get back to the barn. He never went out of the gate even when it was open - mainly because he did not bother to wander past the bend in the driveway - the world beyond the bend was apparently beyond his jurisdiction and he had no interest in it. Everyone loved him. Trainers would come to look at regular yearlings for their clients… and yet the first thing they always asked was - “where is Cowboy?” He had a funny Beavis and Butthead laugh kind of voice… and was a real character. He has been gone for many years now and I still miss him plunging out of the rhododendrons to greet me…
Cowboy on patrol… 
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OUCH!
You sure got beat up by that mini!
Judging by the 'tude I sometimes get from mine (when he’s not being my stuffed toy), Im glad you recovered 
That 1st year had one heckuva learning curve! 
I also had sheep appear one morning.
Called the police as I worried they’d head for the busy St Rd not 2mi away.
Their advice:
Call DNR 
Sheep are a Natural Resource?
Instead, I filled a can of oats & lured them into my fenced chickenyard (I didn’t have hens yet, it was pretty shabby).
Another set of kiddos showed up to retrieve their 4H Project 
I guess sheep don’t subscribe to the Never Leave Your Property either 
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Every animal who is enclosed with hot wire knows exactly where it is , I agree.
The fact that your horse chose to hit the hot wire of his own accord is strange, especially since he is a veteran at being blanketed.
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Yet. They haven’t strayed off the property or close to it yet. Neither had any of the horses I and others have posted about…until they did. Heck, not too long ago there was a video that was posted on Facebook of a girl chasing a horse down the middle of the highway. They’d obviously been at a show (girl has on show clothes and a number) and the horse had gotten loose. The girl is chasing the loose horse down on her own horse. Down the middle of a highway.
I can almost predict the outraged future thread from you about how it’s someone else’s fault that your horse gets spooked and runs off the property while grazing loose. It won’t be YOUR fault, and it won’t be your horse acting like a horse (because in your mind your horse doesn’t do this and wouldn’t because he’s a herd animal). So rather than saying, “Gee, maybe letting horses graze loose on the property isn’t a great idea,” you’ll find someone else to blame. Just like how it’s the BO’s daughter’s fault that your horse behaved like a horse and moved into a strand of hot wire that is right where he’s fed while being blanketed. In your mind, this can’t be because horses…move and stuff…or because it’s unwise to feed them (and blanket them) right in front of a strand of hot wire. It has to be the young woman’s fault.
I’m sorry to be mean, but your common sense seems…deficient.
And just to add more evidence to the pile…at my current barn, a horse recently got loose from his owner while she was lunging him out in an open field. He took off and ran across empty field AWAY from the barn and pastures with horses and was in a neighbor’s backyard before they could get the golf carts and herd him back away from the neighborhood.
Best of luck to you with the free grazing. I love my horse and trust that he’s a pretty steady dude, but when I take him out to graze in open areas, he’s attached to me at all times. It’s just irresponsible otherwise. I couldn’t live with myself if I turned my horse loose and he wound up hurting himself or someone else. There’s just no point in it. If you’re too lazy to stand there and hand-graze the horse, put him back in the pasture.
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Me too!! That’s perfect.
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Don’t forget that according to J-Lu, she has taught the BO’s.
Herd bound means the horse gets upset if the other horse leaves. But if said horse leaves the other horse, then everything is still okay in their World, even if that means going out an open gate.
What is worrying about this thread is we know that there is over a year of NH training. From what we know about some NH trainers are that they teach that the students are finally being taught correctly and every one else is wrong and idiotic.
I think by this point the facts like, a horse is horse bound and won’t leave the property are being parroted from the NH trainer, and their cool aid has been thoroughly drunk and the anecdotal scenes they have witnessed are thought of as facts for the whole World.
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Unless the entire herd leaves the property, as happened with my neighbors a few years ago. Someone left a gate open. Their three very herd-bound horses all moved, as a herd, to my yard to graze. Left the property just because they could. Walked down the road and into my yard just because they could.
I caught one and took it home, the other two followed. Herd bound? Absolutely. Going for a walkabout together? Absolutely. Then, you’re not dealing with one loose horse, but an entire herd of them.
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