barbed wire fencing!!

[fburton]

I can look back and laugh at this picture now because I only had superficial wounds to deal with. It depends on what nature your horses have to be fair. If you look closely you can just see my old mare in the corner, she is probably saying "you stupid stubbon headed irish male, I told you so." 42acres of rich dairy pasture and he tried to escape into a rough grazing field.

OMG! My TB Lucky got stuck in the 2 foot gap between a barbed wire fence and a stone wall just like that, only with gorse bushes in front and behind so he couldn't move in any direction. I don't know how long he was there, waiting to be rescued; thinking about it makes me shudder. He wasn't wearing a rug, and had nasty scrapes injuries all over one side of him that took weeks to heal. I hate the stuff. Unfortunately it is all too common on land offered for grass livery here in Scotland.

 

[Foxhunter49]

I dislike any form of wire for fencing.
No stock has any respect for plain wire and will lean into it so it stretches and becomes slack.
I have also had a horse entangled in plain wire when she rolled into it.

Stock netting is OK if it is on a perimeter fence and they cannot lean into it.

Even post and railings can be dangerous as when a colt galloped into it and staked himself in a rail which entered in his chest and was protruding through his ribs by his elbow, He lived!

I have mains electric running on the rope and fixed posts dividing the fields with high tensile wire inset to the sheep wire around the perimeters, even so I had a mare slip and slide into the stock netting.

if they can damage themselves then they will!

Two of the nastiest accidents I have seen with fencing were done on gate catches not the fence itself!

 

[amandap]

I'm sure most people wouldn't want barbed wire banned, but if it was we would soon find and get used to other safe ways. There was a world before barbed wire was invented.

Electric I agree isn't suitable for road frontage but electric is only as good as the installation and maintenance anyway. Horses and cattle soon know if the kick is down or low. They manage to keep pigs in with electric very successfully on many, many farms and they dig. Ok they don't jump too well.

 

[Dry Rot]

My ring fence on 30 acres is Rylock (square mesh) with one barbed wire on top. But then I have a 10 metre shelter belt inside that with the permanent electric fence between the trees and the livestock. The two stock fences which still have one barbed wire on top have a single strand of electric on each side on offsets.