I love the Euro doors and hve seen many all over in Europe, so they must be well thought of there or they would not be so common.
I get that mvp is concerned and if she wants any sleep she probably should give them a pas.
I have had one horse try to jump out of his stall and it was a plain old simple dutch door style. He got high centered one night and it was a scary job trying to ge the lower door off its pins. He was unhurt, but could have been there quite a while. And he was a Quarter Horse, no less.
Overall, the sliding doors work as the horse cannot get his head over and also when enterig or leaving the stall there is no door to get hung up on.
I’m a definite “no” on the European style stall fronts. They make great fodder for glossy advertising, but are generally avoided. They are impractical for all the reasons suggested: price, ability for the horse to reach over into the aisle and harass other horses, grab halters/blankets, etc., ability for the horse to reach over and rake their teeth in the wood of the stall front, and of course the fact that they are not useful for young stock who might attempt to jump out, and they create a potential resale issue. They also are very inviting for people to feed treats to or pet horses that they shouldn’t be fooling with.
Now I’m going to speak on yokes. I know a lot of people love yokes and love for horses to be able to hang their heads in the aisle. Yokes are a perfectly acceptable option and do not create a resale issue. However, yokes do have some issues. Horses can and do attempt to escape through yokes, and in some instances can put their head through the V of the yoke and press forcibly enough on the door to rip it off the wall (a desperate 1200 lb horse can exert quite a bit of force on a door if they can get their head through it). Ask me how I know. IMO, and I’ve kept horses for a long time in a wide variety of types of barns with all kinds of doors, the very best option is a door that does not allow horses to stick their heads out. That means either full mesh, bars and mesh, or bars top half and wood lower half.
I know it sounds like you are going to go with doors with the yokes, and that’s fine, but I’m only mentioning my opinion on this to point out that it really isn’t the end of the world if a horse can’t get it’s head out. The fantasy of horse heads hanging out into the aisle is highly over rated. Horse heads in the aisle are nothing but trouble IRL.
I did a lot of research and am so happy with my stalls. I have 16.3 and 17.3 warmbloods. I built mine 8’ on the sides and the door 5’. I also set the bars on 3". The stalls were custom built and then they also personally delivered & installed. All total, they were no more expense than other name brands such as Priefert. I do have a 16’ aisle.
I have owned a 54 stall boarding facility and a 12 stall boarding facility so know well that horses can do almost anything. I’ve had several types of stall fronts and managed 100s of horses. I honestly don’t believe the European stall fronts present any more challenges than others with drop or open fronts.
I love the openness and the ventilation. And the horses seem to agree. All are more peaceful than at the lovely stalls in my previous barn.
It seems that those bars on the bottom of the doors should be double as many.
A horse laying down and rolling and kicking out with a hind foot and hitting those as they look in the pictures just at the right angle may easily put a foot thru them?
I have seen pictures of two horses do that thru bars like that set above 4’ height, between stalls, one a front foot, another a hind foot.
Could happen easier down there, I would be afraid.
Horses can get hurt on anything, hard to build a padded stall, is it.
I agree with you. Looking at the link, those stalls are pretty to look at but IMO not safe. They might be okay for full grown, large breed horses, but a pony or a foal could easily get a leg caught. Width between bars is a huge issue. There are horror stories of even medium sized horses inexplicably getting a foot caught between bars, even when the bars seemed to be reasonably spaced and the bars were higher up on the stall front. One might wonder why stall manufacturers would offer these unsafe options, but they save money and are able to offer cheaper options by cutting corners on bar spacing.
My advice: be VERY careful about bar spacing and if you have a variety of horses consider using square mesh instead of bars. If you do go with bars, do NOT use them for the lower part of a stall front / stall door.
I believe the bars used low down are 3" on center. That’s prolly 2" between them. Also, at least one company whose mesh bottoms I saw (Barnware.com) had the vertical wires composing that mesh on the inside of the door.
In either case, a front foot pawing is most likely to slide down. A hind foot caught when rolling? I dunno-- the spaces are small. I do appreciate the possibility of somehow getting the heel of a shoe caught.
The bars above are spaced wider. When I have firmed up the specs on those, I’ll let you all know what I find. To me, they look to be about 4" on center. But I will walk around friends’ barns and measure. The lowest I have seem those barns start is 4’. The bars composing the bottom of a yoke start at 4’9" or so, perhaps 4’6" for some companies and 5’ for others. I believe anything lower at the lowest point than 4’9" takes some discussion and customization.
When I hear back from a couple of manufacturers about their thoughts on height and safety, I’ll pass that on to you guys, too.
One way to eliminate the gauntlet is to have a wider aisle. My barn has tall doors but open counters - about 4’ where they can look out and I think they really enjoy that. they have done lots of stupid things but they have not, knock wood, tried to jump out. If I have a new horse I’m worried about I hang a blanket over the opening until they don’t think about it.
Making sure they can’t reach the crossties is helpful too, because having them play with the crosstie when someone is in it is annoying.
I have more problems with them seeing a gap wide enough for their heads and thinking the rest of them will fit - and they barge through the doors knocking them off the rails.
We had a horse attempt to jump out of the yoke style stall front once. Horse has a special case of whack a doo all around but it was traumatic, happened later in the night when we were still doing lessons. Anyways we started shutting the big stall doors at night. Only happened once but still.
Regarding bar spacing, our fronts are 3 inch OC on top and 2 inch OC on bottom. The tubing is 1 inch (14 gauge). Some companies have 4 inch OC as standard but you often can request 3 inch instead. We did bars instead of mesh because I’ve seen horses catch shoes on mesh occasionally.
Also, we have no issue with shavings spillage into the aisle. The euro fronts must be mounted onto a concrete curb; our stall flooring is recessed about 4 inches. So even deep bedding would be highly unlikely to overflow. We typically put less shavings in front of doorways anyway.
I think the concerns about safety issues are a bit overblown. I wouldn’t wean a baby in these stalls but for a private farm with relatively chill horses, they should be fine. Also, no one mentioned some safety advantages, such as the ability to feed and water without entering a stall (for those with young or less experienced family members, for example)…
I would not have any problem with shorter doors/fronts. In my opinion, if a horse is going to try to jump or climb out of a stall, it’s not going to matter much what the exact design or height of said stall is – I think most of us have seen the madness horses will attempt that defies logic. In the balance, if a horse DOES try it, I would rather have an open design that was easy to jump out of so there was less risk of injury, because I’ve never had any luck stopping a horse from doing something dumb once it sets its mind to it. I do think it’s smart to design so that if you ever DO need more physical barriers, it’s easy to add them (like attachment points for stall guards or other options for problem children).
While I don’t stall my horses per se, my run-in shed functions like a barn of sorts. And my horses’ “doors” are a single strand of hot tape at about chest height (horses are 16 h - 16.2). Which is not always hot (it’s just us here). I have never had a horse even ponder leaping over it. If they are upset that their buddy is leaving, they do run around, but since the shed is open to their fields, if they want to leave they could just jump the fence (it’s not that high in places), but they don’t. And yes, they know how to jump, at least two have evented through Training Level.
I definitely wouldn’t want that in, say, a busy commercial boarding barn, but at my home, where I’m keeping my own horses who I know & I train, it’s not an issue. Another factor is – what are the consequences if a horse does get out? If it’s still contained on the farm, that doesn’t bother me – my whole property is 0.3 miles from the nearest road & on the few occasions I’ve had horses get out, they just eat grass around my house & they’d have to go a long way & pass a lot of interesting things to find traffic.
And I’ll also add, I never thought much about horses chewing things up because I had never owned a chewer. I do now – he is a freaking equine rodent who will chew up anything (not a cribber, he just likes to chew the world, it’s his outlet for his active brain). Fortunately, I already didn’t keep things within reach of their “doors” but I’m having to be way more careful about how I build things & where I leave them.
When building my barn I had several criteria that I knew were dealbreakers. The first were stalls with bars. I knew several horses at the time who had somehow got their foot stuck in the stall bars that ended catastrophically. Since I built, I sold a beautiful young horse and at his new home he was caught with a foot through the stall bars and badly injured including losing sight in one eye. Anyhow, I have mesh in my stalls instead of bars. I love it. My second thing was no sliding doors. I’ve seen so many horses injured trying to go through a slider that wasn’t fully open and been in too many barns where the slider was sticky after a year or two, even in well maintained barns with high quality fronts. So swing doors only for me. My final was no wood in the barn. My stalls are all plastic lumber and the walls are covered in rubber. Best decision ever. The stalls still look brand new, and the plastic lumber can be sanitized and washed. I wish all my fencing and everything else on my farm was plastic lumber as well. I would never knowingly introduce one scrap of wood onto my property again if I could help it. I just built 2 new shelters with metal framing and plastic lumber.
To your original question, I also love the look of european stall fronts but had the same concerns you do about horses jumping out or eating their blankets or biting passing horses. To alleviate this I split the difference in my barn. One side of the alley has dutch doors so the horses can be completely closed in or have a half door open and the other side is european fronts. I have never had a horse even think of leaving the euro stalls, and I bring in young horses away from their friends who’ve never been inside before. I prefer the euro fonts to the dutch doors. The euro doors are tall enough that horses don’t lean on them, while the bottom of the dutch doors are a bit too low. If I were to re-do it, I would have the dutch door bottoms be higher. Horses do sometimes pull their blankets down or make faces at horses going past, but there is no negative to my europ fronts that I’ve found. The horses in the Euro stalls are less likely to bite than those in the dutch stalls, don’t know why. My alleys are also 14’ wide so you can safely navigate even with both horses heads out.
I personally don’t like yokes, especially the ones with the fold down closure. Again, I’ve seen a horse catch his bottom jaw on one and it wasn’t pretty.
Both horses I know who got their foot threw the bars the space was maybe 2" and both were a hind foot. In both cases the horse had to wait hours for a welder to come cut the bars to get them out. It was insane because the bars were tight around the ankle of the horse, there was no way the wider hoof was getting back through.
What? Yikes. I believe you, but how TF? So the force they horse generated with that hind foot (a metric crap-ton PSI) stuffed the foot between the bars and bent them a tad? I will consider that. I’m leaning toward the mesh. Do you think you could cut that (or the bars) with a hack saw or sawzall? That “waiting hours for a welder” is another Yikes.
Agreed, mine’s corded though. As soon as I bought my farm my dad insisted on me getting some specific tools I didn’t already have, just in case they’d be needed someday. One was an angle grinder.
I have never been married nor had baby, so I never had one of those showers in which you gear up for your new life. But now that I’m building my first farm, I feel like I should be able to register at quarries or hardware stores and have my more experienced friends set me up.
FYI…Ramm is having their annual spring sale, with a reasonable price on a European type stall front. I just ordered five for the barn I am building. The lowest point is almost 5’ high, about the same height as most of my fence, so I kind of look at it that way from a containment perspective, and its not like they can get a good gallop at it. While the can stick their heads over, the taller front prevents a potential nipper from really reaching far into the aisle unless it is an unusually tall horse. My stalls also have exterior dutch doors, and the barn is designed with a lot of natural light and good ventilation, so a fairly content environment. I also have two 12x24 full contained sliding door stalls in my existing barn, so I do have a place to put a horse who may not play well with the euro stall fronts. Otherwise, I probably would have made a provision for that (doing 1-2 stalls with a full grill front of some kind).
