Horse high, Bull strong, and Pig tight...

...or, All You Ever Wanted to Know About Split Rail Fences (and then some!)

Whenever we take a road trip, we comment that we can't drive many miles without seeing something noteworthy. This past weekend was no exception. We stopped at The Grand Staircase Monument in Escalante, Utah, and saw a replica of an old split rail fence. I've seen split rail fences before, but this one looked particularly dangerous to livestock. The rails were sharpened into a dangerous point, and criss-crossed at an angle that could surely do some damage to any animal trying to escape the enclosure. The placque said that the fences were built, "horse high, bull strong, and pig tight". I thought that sounded interesting enough to Google, and indeed, this is what I found in The Encyclopedia Americana (and who doesn’t consider that their “must read” Bible?), “The common saying in the farming districts is that a fence must be horse high, bull strong, and pig tight; that is, so high that a horse can’t jump it, so strong that a bull can’t throw it down by charging it, and so tight that a pig cannot crawl through it.” An additional bit of information (for those of you who can never get enough of this fascinating stuff): the horses learned not to try and jump the fence, because "horse high, really meant belly high", and those horses who did try to escape found those sharp stakes extremely painful. So, if you are planning on keeping livestock corralled with a split rail fence, you might want to keep this in mind!