Comparing Horse Fencing

One of my great Cooperative Extension REINS (Regional Equine Information Network System) program volunteers approached me with a need for a plan to evaluate fencing on horse rescue farms. She has the coolest job as a field inspector with an animal sanctuary agency and is regularly required to make a judgement call as to whether or not the fencing on a farm is suitable and safe for the horses to be housed there. In an effort to come up with a tool to remove some of the subjectivity of that task, we sat down and devised the following rating guide. We believe this guide can be useful to many horsemen (not a gender specific title ) as they try to determine the safety and utility of the fencing on their own farms, sites they may be considering boarding a horse or the fencing on a farm they may be considering for purchase. While we were putting this together, what we concluded is that there is no one single type of fencing that can be said to be “the best” for every situation when considering expense, maintenance and effectiveness.
The following link contains the evaluation document we created:

 A Comparison of Horse Fencing