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Use of electric fences
There seems to be great concern by some horse-owners over the use of electric fencing - i.e. psychological damage - archaic use thereof - inhumane - and so on - I use it and don't notice and psychological damage - in fact I think it is a wonderful way to keep them safe as far as fencing goes - may I have your comments on this subject?Dr. Suzanne Millman, Ontario Veterinary College
Good question, and one I have puzzled through also. Electric fencing is an excellent way of keeping horses within the confines of their pastures, but there are some important factors to consider. There are different types of electric fencing available (tape, string, etc), and I am aware of some horses being injured by some of the tape products if they manage to get caught up in it. Key factors for making electric fencing work for you is (1) train the horses to recognize what it looks like and what it does, (2) make sure the horse doesn't end up shocking itself indiscriminately since this can cause suspicious behaviour such that the horse may believe the pasture is the problem, or the gate since these are better predictors of being shocked (3) make sure the horses don't learn to go through the fence (short term pain = long term gain). Horses are good at discriminating between stimuli that are important and stimuli they can ignore, so they can easily learn what an electric fence looks like. They will need to experiment with touching the fence so that they receive a shock and know that they should avoid it. Otherwise the horse is just respecting a visual barrier (i.e.: the ribbon of fence) and when motivated to challenge the fence (when food is scarce or if being chase) there is little incentive to prevent this behaviour. You want to entice the horse to touch the fence, but you don't want the horse to associate being shocked with you as the handler. You also want to make sure that when the horse jumps to avoid the shock it won't end up backing into another portion of the fence, since that will cause it to panic and it will seem like the shocks come indiscriminately (no way to predict it) and that it won't get caught in the fence (i.e.: better to shock its muzzle than to put its whole head through the fence and then get a shock when its neck happens to touch the fence. As long as the horse is able to learn what the electric fence is and has the ability to avoid being shocked, the fence will work well. NOTE: If the horse keeps being shocked, perhaps because it is bullied in the paddock that is poorly designed to too small, this can impact on its temperament. Electric shocks are used experimentally to induce anxiety and aggression in laboratory animals. However, research has shown that if the animal can control, or even just predict when this will happen, stress responses are significantly reduced. Electric fencing with dogs is problematic because it is often difficult for the dogs to predict the shocks if they are aroused and playing near an invisible fence. The more stimuli that warn the animal about the fence the better, so I would NOT use an invisible fence with horses.