Last night, just after midnight, a runaway herd of eight or nine horses made their way into our yard and woke up the pack who, naturally, then woke the whole neighborhood up to come save them.

Huskies may look fierce…

…but in reality they are big, furry babies!

Once we shooed them off and got the pups safely inside and away from the big, scary intruders, they calmed down and went back to sleep and we phoned the sheriff before watching as the horses meandered down the street and into the dark of night.

Hopefully their owner has found and safely corralled them by now!

We have solar motion detecting lights in their pens so it was bright enough that I could have gotten some good pictures but we were more worried about calming the chaos and preventing the horses from possibly pushing over our kennel fencing and releasing the hounds. When we first looked out the window, a few of them were nose to nose with a few of the dogs through the kennel fencing.

Yikes!

It’s good fencing, but it’s definitely not horse proof. Had they wanted to, they could have probably pushed it right down.

That would have been bad. Very, very, very bad!

We weren’t mad about it because we totally understand how hard it is to keep critters corralled. We’ve spent a lot of time, effort and money to keep our chickens, ducks and other poultry safely penned and it hasn’t always been successful (which is why we lost and then caught our pheasant rooster recently!).

Livestock is one thing. It’s been an even bigger challenge keeping these crazy sled dogs contained.

Huskies are NOT easy to keep from running, as you may know. They LOVE to run, run run and can run up to 100 miles a day – it’s in their DNA – so they will dig under, climb over and may even be able to teleport when you’re not looking. We’re not convinced that’s impossible with this breed.

The only time we’ve had a problem is when we still had chain link fencing up and Juno dug an escape tunnel and went on a chicken killing spree a few years ago. She still has zero remorse for it, too.

That incident is what prompted us to invest in better fencing. We also added electric wire along the top, locking mechanisms on the gates, and a few feet of wire fencing buried along the bottom edge to prevent digging out.

Juno still tries, but she doesn’t get anywhere now.

That doesn’t mean it’s foolproof. Last night could have been a disaster if the horses had tried and succeeded in pushing down the kennel fences. I don’t know if they would have, but they sure could have. They were awfully curious about the pups.

Hopefully whoever owns them will do a better job of keeping them corralled now. We are now considering adding a second layer of fencing on the entire property to help keep this from happening again.