Donkeys are different from horses in several ways, so all of the techniques might not work, but I'm going to give it a try. Monty Robert's philosophy is pretty much the same as mine and from what I've seen, a lot of the things he does, I do naturally anyway. Now, mind you, I have never in my life "trained" an equine. Every horse I've ever had came to me already trained and I never gave it much thought. But, hey, until we bought this farm I'd never milked a goat, never halter broke a donkey, never grew a garden, never built a fence, never trained a livestock guardian dog, etc. etc. My list of "never dones" is pretty long, so why stop now?
Anyway, I've been searching for either livestock panels or portable dog kennel panels to make a round pen with. In his TV programs, Monty Roberts uses what looks like dog kennel panels. You can buy a 50 foot round pen from his website for about 4,500.00. Many ranchers around here use the livestock panels that you can hook together in whatever shape you need. I could get a cheap round pen new for 750.00. Looking on craigslist, I could buy up every dog kennel I could find for about 150.00-250.00 for a 10x10 pen.
But, I found this guy on craigslist that was selling all of his dog kennel panels - 15 6' panels and 6 10' panels for 400.00! That makes up a round pen that is just a little short of 50 feet.
Now I have to get serious. No more excuses for not training the donkeys. Ack!
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7 comments:
Wow, and you didn't even have to grade a level spot for it.
Well, that spot is a little sloped, but I thought it would be OK since we aren't going for the olymics. Heh. Have to be careful about gopher holes, too, but there is no place to put it that doesn't have gopher holes.
We'll start slow and easy and figure I they know about the gophers anyway.
You need to anchor it into the ground. Plus a horse is very visual, so you need something going across those panels so the horse/pony won't run right thru it.
I would highly suggest cow panels for the round pen.
Er... Corral panels. Not cow panels. You can get them at feed stores or even tractor supply.
I favor using the woven wire also. For the reasons Bill gives, and also because it has more "give." I have used a woven wire round pen for many years, and still do. Five or six years ago we built a second round pen panels with cattle panels in a different field. It looked very spiffy. The first time we used it was at a clinic, where an out-of-control novice dog ran one of the sheep into a panel. Its neck broke and it had to be put down (fortunately, one of the clinic attendees was a vet). If that sheep had been run into wire fencing I'm sure the damage would have been minimal
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