| Thanks to Randy & Mary for suggesting this article.
Is your horse eating you out of barn and corral? Here's some ways of coping with the Great North America Equine Fence Beaver (aka that horse in the back yard).
If you have horses inside wooden fences, chances are you have experienced the frustration of discovering that most of your rails now look like some special sculpture - or worse, have been eaten right through the middle and are allowing your horses to escape!
Any time horses are cooped up, they tend to get bored. The horse is an animal that was designed to graze about 16 to 20 hours a day. By feeding him a few flakes of hay twice a day, we take away his natural day-long gazing period - leaving him with a lot of bored time on his hands.
This time can be filled many different ways - playing with the other horses, sleeping, and of course eating stuff like dirt, and our fences. Eating dirt and chewing fences can be a very obvious sign of boredom - or they can be related to lack of something in the diet. And some horses just chew - all the time. Once it becomes a habit, like cribbing or weaving, the horse does it whenever the opportunity presents itself.
So first, if your horses are chewing the fences, I would suggest checking their diet. Make sure they are getting enough hay to eat, and that if your area has deficiencies (our whole Pacific Northwest area is mostly selenium deficient) that you feed a good quality mineral mix to supplement your horse's diet. If you aren't sure what mineral mix to try, talk to your local vet, and then to other horse owners in the area to see what they are using and why.
If diet is not the cause, you'll have to try other things to keep the horses from eating you out of barn and corral!
One of the more desirable ways of preventing chewing on fences is to replace rails with pipe fences. Of course, this is a "pipe dream" for most of us! However, it is something to look at if you have a supply of metal pipe and a welder in the family.
The most common suggestion I came across in my research is to use electric fencing. There are several ways of doing this which I will go into next week. |
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If you are new to Northern B.C. Horse, check out all the previous issues on the Archive page.
Kristi is building a great knowledge base about horses, with the emphasis on our area of the world.
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Western, English, Penning or Trail riding, all equine sports have a voice on Northern B.C. Horse
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Last week I mentioned that tobianos are the horses that many people remember as being called "pintos". The overo horse is the one that many people refer to as a 'Paints".
While some overos may indeed be Paints, not all of them are - and some tobiano pintos are Paints too. I'll try to explain here.
The difference between a Paint and a Pinto is this: A Paint is a horse that is registered with the American Paint Horse Association. A Pinto is any horse that has patches of colour and white.
The reason for this is the registry. The APHA registers horses from Paint, Quarter Horse, or Thoroughbred breedings. The horse should have pinto colouring, but if it doesn't meet the minimum requirements, then it can still be registered as a "breeding stock"
A breeding stock Paint is a horse that can't be shown in regular coloured classes at APHA shows, but that it can be bred to another registered Paint horse to try and obtain pinto babies. So you can have a "solid" Paint.
And that's where it gets confusing. Not all Paints are pintos, and not all pintos are Paints. Lost yet?
Pintos include ALL horses that have patches of white. While any coloured Paint is also a pinto, you can also find pinto Saddlebreds, pinto mules, pinto grade horses, pinto Shetland ponies, and so on.
Any horse that does not have patches of white cannot be considered a pinto.
There are colour registries, like the Canadian Pinto Horse Association and the National Pinto Horse Association of America, and so on. These will register pinto horses from any breed or type.
A Paint horse that is a pinto can be "double registered", or hold papers with both the APHA and the Pinto registry. In fact, there are at least three Pinto registries that you could register an already registered Paint horse in - thus making the horse "quadruple registered". Clear as mud right?
Just think of it this way - a Paint is a breed registry based on foals born to Quarter Horse, Thoroughbred and Paint registered horses. A pinto is any horse with patches of colour.
Next week, we start to look at the overo genes.
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