Fencing

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Fencing in my world never had anything to do with swords, sabers or epees. Fencing to us was an exercise in installing a long piece of wire which had been made dangerous by the embedding of sharp spikes into it every four inches or so. This wire had to be stretched really, really tight between the supports. Now, I say supports instead of fenceposts because on our farm you used everything available - like trees, big shrubs, rocks and etc. to support the wire. If you could stick an inch and a half wire staple in it, you did. There were no queensbury rules about repairing fences either - just mission accomplishment. The mission in all cases was to keep cows on the correct side of the fence.

Barbed wire fences have many enemies. It is really not unusual for a tree which is leaning away from the fence at a 45 degree angle to suddenly reverse its lean and fall directly on the wire. In such cases the repair involves a chainsaw and several posts. The wire, being stretched significantly by the tree becomes very loose in all directions and must be tightened. There is not enough wire present to join together with a twist, so you must always patch in a short piece of wire - making the resultant fence an engineering marvel, but an artist's eyesore. Other enemies of fences are hunters who wreck them for no reason at all, bulls and large cows who just have to have the grass on the other side and time which rusts the most expensive wire and rots the most resilient posts. If you own one mile of exterior (or perimeter) fence; odds are that at any given moment there is a weak spot or hole in it. Many times the hole will be large enough for 5 cows to elope with the neighbor's bull at the same time.

A cow that leaves through a hole in the fence will remember that place and return home - most of the time. However, before the prodigal decides to "make nice" she will generally leave a large pile of cow droppings in someone's rosebed, or trample an acre of sweet corn in order to get to the other side, or especially if she is completely black in color, she will have to stand in the road at night. And most neighbors and motorists are really not that understanding. A lot of times they want you to pay them for the damages! Sometimes they incarcerate your cow in a barn and keep her until you fix or pay for the damages! Many times, county law becomes involved making any serenity that you may have go up in flames.

I guess I don't know which is the worse - cows or fences...