Some of you may recall that the family New Year’s Resolution involved demonstrating once and for Who Is Really In Charge Here and definitively fence in (corral) Carl The Goat Terror and his cohorts where they belong, like the rest of the goats on the planet. This has been a long term endeavor, and not to be over reaching; we agreed that getting the task done SOMETIME in 2014 was a reasonable goal. Setting about the job without proper consultation would never do, as we mean business this time, Carl. So I called Premier Fencing’s tech support line in the first week of January. They’re the folks that handily instructed us how to create a llama corral that was never, ever questioned. Not by the resident coyotes, and not by our herd of three hundred pound llamas. The fence was never defied..a flagship of human will over a grazing animals instincts to eat the surrounding landscape into dust. Our otherwise untrainable dog was indeed trained in a single dog-meets-electrical-fence event, and that was that. So I had every reason to believe we were entering our next successful corral building endeavor. Pricey though the components were, I selected the sturdiest and best in each category. Let it not be said that failure was due to parsimony.
Tech support guy said the first strand would be 4 inches from the ground, and the last would be shoulder height. Days of digging post holes and cementing in posts turned into hours, and hours, and hours of drilling insulators exactly thus, and then days of stringing (the very best) electrical wire through all those insulators..until finally we were ready to flip the charger switch and do the family We Beat Carl And His Band of Criminals Dance. Ha. Son Frankie did the electrical switch honors, and daughter Tess insisted on a lawn chair and snacks to witness our dominion. As expected, Carl came charging toward us, with the fence surely at the ready to halt him. As he approached, he didn’t even slow down. No. He leapt through the lines, thereby losing his grounding, absolutely a necessity for a shock, and sooooo, fence was totally worthless. A decorative frame etched on our hillside as as some sort of modern art installation. Tech guy apparently wasn’t aware I have special, flying goats. The rest of the herd followed in seconds, each flying through the lines, just like Carl the Criminal had shown them. Tessa handed her snacks to Carl in defeat, and tight lipped.. folded her lawn chair up without comment. Frankie rolled his eyes at me like only a teenager can, and just said, “really, Mom?”
To be continued….
