Sized for the smallest animal in the pen
With Nigerian Dwarfs, the fence has two jobs in opposite directions. It must keep coyotes, loose dogs, and raccoons out, and it must keep very small kids in — a newborn dwarf kid weighs only a few pounds and can wriggle through a gap an adult goat would never attempt. Standard cattle panels and wide-spaced woven wire fail that second job completely.
Fine-mesh woven wire or welded wire panels with small openings are the right starting material. Check the whole perimeter at kid height, not your own: kneel down and look for the ground-level irregularities, gate bottoms, and feeder gaps that read as doorways to a two-day-old kid exploring away from its dam.
Height matters, but climbing matters more
Dwarf goats are compact, springy, and famously inventive about climbing anything stored near a fence — spools, dog houses, hay feeders, each other. A predator fence also has to survive that: mesh that sags becomes a ramp, and a play structure parked against the fence line is a launch pad over it. Keep climbable objects well inside the pen, away from the boundary, and keep the top of the mesh taut.
On the predator side, height plus an outward-facing electric strand does the persuading. A coyote that can simply hop a low fence never has to test the wire at all, so build tall enough that jumping is a real effort, and place the electric offset where an investigating dog's nose arrives first. Corners deserve bracing and a second look, because goats pile and push in corners and a bowed corner post opens both an escape and an entry.
A separate, covered kid zone
The most vulnerable Nigerian Dwarfs are kids in their first weeks, and they face threats adults ignore: large birds from above and raccoons that can reach through coarse mesh. A kidding and nursery pen inside the main fence, built with the finest mesh you use anywhere on the property and covered overhead with netting or a solid roof section, closes both routes. Dams can stay with their kids there at night, which is when most losses happen.
That inner pen should be easy to reach from the house or barn and quick to shut. If a dog is heard worrying the fence line after dark, you want one gate between you and a pen you can make fully secure in the dark without fumbling.
The routine that keeps small goats safe
Small breaches appear constantly in a dwarf goat pen: a kid widens a soft spot, a feeder gets dragged to the fence, meltwater scores a channel underneath. A short daily walk at feeding time, done at ground level with the mesh in arm's reach, catches nearly all of it. Count kids against dams on that same walk — a missing kid is often a fence problem you have not found yet.
Take any goat with bite wounds, a torn ear, or sudden fearfulness around the pen to a veterinarian promptly, since small animals hide injuries under stress and deteriorate quickly.
Put that fence walk and kid count on a named person's list each day in KinsLe Care Teams, where the finished check is marked with a timestamp the whole household can see.