Do you want it to break or not?

Different situations, different answers…

You don’t get to see the more dramatic picture where the gate was not only off both hinges but was open a full horse width, because I was hustling off to see if I had loose horses instead of stopping to take a picture

I came out to do afternoon chores and saw this gate not just off the hinges, but off the hinges with no paint horses in sight. So after pulling it closed enough to keep them from going through it again if they came back into the arena, I hustled off to find them.

They were where they were supposed to be, peacefully eating in their field. So I came back and put the gate back on the hinges.

Both Junior and Kona “think” with their front feet (another way of saying they paw at things when they get impatient), so this gate has been pulled off its hinges before. But never with such a wide gap left open.

So this time I made the decision to fix it so that it would be much more difficult for a horse to pull off the pins. This is a significant decision because if the gate doesn’t break, and the horse gets caught in it, the horse might be what “breaks” (gets hurt).

I’ve had close calls with this in the past. Guy pulled a gate off the hinges and dragged it about 10 feet on his pastern (below the ankle in person anatomy). He was undamaged (he was sturdy)

Kona has pulled gates off 2 times in the past and gotten his leg trapped in the gate both times. The first time he got caught because the spacing between the bars was narrower than you see here (so how did he get his foot through? It’s a mystery). That resulted in swapping out the gates near him for ones with wider spacing between the bars.

The second time Kona got his foot caught, he had put it through the wider bars but then it slid down and got caught in the diagonal bracing bracing on the gate. That time we put a board over the “pinch point” of the diagonal bracing.

What we do know he’s smart and has a sense of self preservation. When he gets trapped he waits patiently for someone to come and rescue him (2 stories around that for future blog posts).

So the reversal of the pins. We’ll see how it turns out.

Til next time…