This message is from: Marsha Jo Hannah <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Mike & Casey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Do the rest of you find that your Fjords that are on a diet don't > respect electric fences? [...] Tyr just shoves the fence strands up > on his mane and pushes on thru til it breaks. [...] More strands? > Hotter charger? I hate to spend the time/effort/money in doing those > things if they don't work well.
Ah, yes---that brings back "fond" (?) memories of the Saga of Containing Sleepy. I started out with two strands of electric fencing tape separating our 3 Fjords' "night paddock" (which quickly became a stripped dirt lot) from the rest of the pasture---"temporarily", to see if I liked the idea. Yes, I did, and the fence worked, so I just left it that way. However, when the grass in the pen was gone, Sleepy The Opportunist started contorting his neck to reach under the fence for one more blade of grass, then another, etc. He apparently learned that he could use his mane for an insulator, and that sometimes, the fence was weaker than others (deer sometimes would hang up the tape on the perimeter barbed-wire fences; I only check the fence "spark" once a week). He pushed harder, and discovered that the fencing tape would break. So, we added galvanized wire over the tape (left the tape for visibility, depended on the wire for strength). Sleepy experimented, and found that sometimes he could push on the wire firmly enough to pop the insulators off the T-posts, then climb thru the sagging wire. So, I took down the electric fencing and put up "real fence"---cattle panels on the T-posts. After a while, during which Sleepy must have scratched his butt on the panels a lot, he managed to strain the fence enough to unwire the panels from the posts. I redid the fence with twice as many posts and more wire; he got it down again. I added a strand of hot wire inside the panel fence, AND rehooked the charger so it only powered the important inner fences (less likely to be shorted out by deer), which put the same spark onto a shorter wire. Sleepy is still considering his next move.... ;-) What I learned: Stronger fence chargers are better, as are stronger fencing materials. When putting electric fence over another fence, use the longest insulators you can, to minimize "accidental" shorting of the hot wire to metal parts of the fence. In any case, check the fences regularly!!!! Interestingly, Nansy and Rom can be contained indefinitely by one strand of unpowered electric fencing "tape", anywhere from 6 inches to 6 feet off the ground. They simply won't go near it, even when Sleepy has proven it's harmless by wiggling thru it, and is happily chowing down on nice lush clover, in plain sight. Let the tape droop even slightly, tho, and Sleepy is right there, figuring out how to get past it. (All I can say is that I'm glad Sleepy only uses his "creativity" toward acquiring food. If he put that intelligence into real mischief, I'm not sure I could "stay ahead of" him!) Marsha Jo Hannah Murphy must have been a horseman-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] anything that can go wrong, will! 30 mi SSE of San Francisco, Calif. -------
