Moonshine is a wood chewer. I think she gets bored and enjoys chewing. I often see her licking the stall doors, the fence, and even the steel gates and every once in a while she seems to take a little nibble. She has plenty of salt licks and we’re working on getting her some horse toys to give her tongue something to do when she’s in the barn (I’ll post about that soon) but for now I needed to protect the wooden doors in her stall. Not only is she slowly destroying them, I’m also afraid she might ingest some wood or at the very least get a splinter in her tongue. There are some products out there to help with this problem such as bitter tasting liquids and steel door coverings. But I had an idea about making a stainless steel or aluminum cover myself for the top piece of wood she’s working on the most. So for part one of this experiment, today I spent a few hours shaping aluminum flashing and securing it to one of her doors to see if it helps. If it works I’ll do a more detailed write-up. I did some preliminary testing to make sure the flashing wasn’t easily torn or cut and made sure to smooth edges and corners and secure all edges.

Here’s what one of her doors looked like before:

and after:

For an update, see below.

Part 1 – Protecting Wooden Stall Doors (this post)
Part 2 – Stall door protection concept – 6 months later