Over the years, I’ve built many a fence for horses and with each one, I swore I’d dug my last posthole, ever. So here I was again, needing another horse fence. Only this time, there was no hope of digging postholes. When you live on hard lava rock with very little soil cover, it’s time to look for other options. But when your horses are just two and a half feet tall, some of the traditional fencing methods for regular horses won’t work anyway. Openings need to be smaller, height can be lower, and hardware doesn’t have to be industrial strength. Still, the basics are the basics. Health and safety of the horses come first and just like their larger counterparts, they need fencing that won’t fall apart when they scratch or lean against it, shade and shelter from the elements, latches that can’t be pried open by inquiring lips, dry footing, adequate water and feed, places to roll, and enough room to run.
My rule of thumb for larger horses has always been to fence at least half an acre per horse. That much space means your horse can get up to a gallop, but you will always have a dry lot without grass. Dry lot feeding instead of pasture has some advantages – you can always tell exactly how much your horse is eating and there is no chance of colic from too much wet green grass. The down side is that your dry lot becomes a muddy mess with rain or snow and you have to provide enough feed and hay to keep your horse’s need to forage satisfied, monitoring the horse’s weight daily to ensure he’s getting enough, but not too many, calories. Horses are meant to forage for their food, eating small amounts but all day long. A horse that’s fed in a dry lot needs multiple feedings per day and runs the risk of boredom which may manifest in some bad habits like pacing, pawing, fence-chewing or other undesirable behaviors.
I found that the recommended rule of thumb for miniatures is, not surprisingly, much less than regular horses – at least 600 square feet per horse. While our house construction project was underway, we converted a slope in front of the house pad into two terraces with the aid of the earthmoving team and equipment that put in our septic tank. This allowed us to have two level areas comprising about 2000 square feet in a roughly square shape. The rock wall that created our house pad eliminated the need for 50 feet of fence, another bonus of creative thinking about the available space we had.
To build the fence, we scaled down my favorite horse fence design with a few modifications to accommodate our unique landscape in Hawaii and the size of our horses. The basic design is a top rail and bottom rail with wire horse fence attached to both. I like this design because it keeps the horses from getting legs or heads in awkward positions between rails. It also keeps dogs out and foals in. Ordinarily, I would run the bottom rail with just about an inch or two of clearance off the ground, but since we couldn’t reasonably dig postholes, we opted for setting the posts in concrete blocks and filling in the gap with rocks from the property (an ongoing process).
Because we needed both affordability and ease of maintenance, we used treated 4”x4” posts with a coat of paint and 2”x6” Trex composite decking for the top and bottom rails. We capped the posts to discourage damage from bugs and rain and used rolls of 36” coated fencing to avoid the rust that eventually attacks anything metal here on the island.
With regular sized horses, I’m always careful to sandwich the fence between the rails and posts with the rails on the inside of the posts, so that if your horse leans or rubs against the fence, he’s pushing the rail against the post instead of off the post. With the minis, I thought we might be okay with the posts on the inside which admittedly is more aesthetically pleasing when you’re on the outside of the enclosure. Either way, I always use screws instead of nails to attach the rails to the posts and lots of fence staples to attach the fence to the rails. All in all, this makes a strong, attractive, and affordable fence that lets you see in and the horses see out. With the height of the cement post blocks added to the width of the fence and rails, the entire structure is just about four feet tall.
We had a hard time finding gates of any sort here on the island without having to ship something in at great expense. So although we’ll probably replace these at some point with something more substantial, we opted to go with a simple paneled garden fence found at Lowe’s.
We put one panel to serve as a gate on either side of the paddock to allow ease of access no matter which side you happen to be on. These gates would never do for full-size horses, but for the minis, they seem to be working fine. We did have to add a small panel of fencing to close the gap between the bottom of the gate and the ground.
We created closures using chains and snap hooks. This is the only system I have found to be horseproof, especially if you have clever horses that love to let themselves out. Zipties were critical to using the simple garden gates as they were designed to be part of a system that links each panel to the next using a pin system.
To finish out the paddock, we added a loafing shed by attaching plywood panels to 4”x4” posts to make an 8’x8’ shaded area, covered by scraps of the same powder coated steel roofing we used on our house. A coat of paint helps guard against weathering and makes the whole paddock fence and loafing shed look more finished. I included a 4’x4’ tack and feed room at one end so that I don’t have to haul things back and forth from the house, and poured a concrete pad for this room to keep hay and feed off the ground and out of the path of rainwater. Within the feed room, pellets, alfalfa cubes, and treats are kept in half-size metal garbage cans to keep rodents out. I put in hooks for halters and lead ropes, and have a shelf ready to install to hold fly spray, brushes, and other odds and ends. Another panel of the garden fence keeps the horses out of the feed room.
Tim installed a hose bib just outside the gate that allows access to water with easy filling of the water tub. We threw a couple of small goldfish in the water tub to make sure we have no mosquitoes attempting to use it as a nursery. I do have to remove the fish when I clean the tub every other day, but they’re easy to catch with a small net and don’t seem to mind the disruption in their routine. The horses have free access to a salt and mineral block in a plastic tub with drain holes, which is kept under the roof so that rain won’t dissolve it away. I feed them in tubs on the ground so that waste is minimized and they can “graze” in a natural position.
The last addition to the loafing shed will be done next week when we level out the floor of the shaded area with sand and cover it with stall mats. That should give the horses a mud-free option when it rains and provide them with a softer place to rest when they choose to lie down.
Finally, I’ve provided a Jolly Ball for them to kick and nose around to help keep them occupied. The entire cost for creating the paddock ended up right around $600 for materials. We put it up ourselves over the course of about five days. We probably could have finished it more quickly, but didn’t want to spend too many hours in the hot Hawaiian sun at one time. Now all we needed was horses to put in the paddock.
Mini-horses in Hawaii 