Elec fence vs. Goats

[Adron]

Bought some goats to clean up around a brushy fence line. Got a solar fence charger to try to keep them in the proper area. They have been trained to elec fence. Meter shows only 3.7 kv. Will this be enough?

[Pat]

Adron, Experience will tell. I'm one of the only critters who ever took notice of the first small solar charger I bought. I just hate being shocked. Funny trait for someone who has been an electrical experimenter since I was 6, worked as an electronic enginner, and am a ham radio do it yourselfer.

With the smaller solar chargers a couple things become real important: 1. You want a VERY GOOD GROUND and 2. you don't want any weeds or anything touching the hot wire as it will shunt so much of the available energy to ground that what is left doesn't have much authority. Probably enough to impress me but I'm a sissy about getting shocked. I am not one of the bozos that can lay their arm across all 6 plugs of a 6 cyl engine and kill it by shorting out the high voltage going to the spark plugs (I have seen more than one idiot do this.)

The weed thing is sort of a chicken and egg conundrum. If you clean out the fence row so the hot wire is not in danger of being shorted out by weeds, then why goats? I guess if you clean it enough to protect the hot wire long enough for the goat=s to eat the weeds you will do better.

Let us know how it turns out as I have an interest in getting a few goats as weed whackers too.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[RichZ]

Goats hate being shocked, and respond well to electric fences. I use an electric fence for my bucks in the summer, when I put them in my woodlot to clean it up. They love being there, and I just use a moveable electric fence, that isn't even on all of the time. They won't go near it. So if your goats have been trained to an electric fence, that will be fine.

[Pat]

Rich, That is good news. I din't know how tough goats were. Now when yet another person calls me an old goat, I'll know they are calling me a softy.

Solar chargers (small units with low voltage storage batts) don't impress lots of stock that respect a REAL CHARGER.

Whoopee, maybe this will move up the time when we can get some goats. Now if we can only get the goats to wear a solar powered insulated electric suit to discourage cougars!

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[egon]

Speaking of cougars.On the north end of Vancouver Island there was an attack on a young boy who was accompaning his father on a fishing trip.

Cougar attacks on the Island occur quite frequently.

Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Pat]

Egon, Vancover Island is beautiful but still it isn't a Disneyesque Theme Park and you need to exercise caution. Better safe than lunch.

Mostly my wife wants (I sort of like the idea) to get ducks and geese for our ponds as well as goats but don't want to have to pen them at night. I will probably go for home made floating islands as refuge for the aquatic fowl but still think we risk having the venture be a coyote and other critter feeding station. Not sure what would be required to keep goats with so many cougar sightings plus coyotes. I don't want to be a shephard standing guard over my flock by night ) or by day either.

Maybe we could train the goats to go in a fenced pen before dark and have the gate auto-close at night only to open after good light the next day.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[egon]

Perhaps a paddock with an attached Shepherds hut would be in order.

We have one such building on the Cabot Trail refered to as "The Stone Sheliag". It is a replica of a Hebridean Shepards Hut. [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

Egon

[Pat]

Egon, Right on dude, your my man.

Next time you are in the area you can build some of these on my place and show me how they work. I'm sure a design optimized through usage in the Hebrides wouldn't require too many iterations of design, build, and test to be successfully transformed to a useful design for south central Oklahoma, especially if you built several different versions to start with. By buillding several different versions we could converge on successful candidate designs much faster.

While your here, if you had any spare time, I could show you how to do stuff on a computer!

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Adron]

I was planning on having my new goats as residents by now. However my neighbor took seriously ill and has been hospitalized since I opened this post. Saw him at the hospital today and he hopes to be home Monday. So maybe I'll have them sometime next week.

He has had goats for many years and I asked his advice on predation. He said unless I was willing to shepherd them, or have a dog such as his Komodore with them, that some predation from coyotes might occur ocasionally.

He had sold me 3 young nannies, with horns left on, and the meanest nastiest old horned nanny on the place. Plus she hates dogs and coyotes. He said that should help, but don't turn your back on her.

His opinion was that 3.7 kv was not enough, but that probably the extended drought we have been having was probably effecting the ground. Since we finally got 2½" rain last night (no runoff, just soaked in like a sponge) I think I'll go check again.

[Pat]

Adron, All but the biggest most expensive solar powered chargers I have seen (limited experience) don't come close to doing what a fairly innexpensive plug in model does. Since I have experience in solar power systems I may just set up a decent panel and deep cycle battery and use an inverter to power a standard charger. This for cattle that when motivated seem to just walk through a good 5 wire and T post fence with stays in between the posts. Of course bulls don't count since they don't respect fences when something on the other side (girlie cows or other bulls) really gets there attention.

More docile stock trained to a hot wire (with ample authority, lots of snap) will respect anything that looks like a hot wire for a while but with a solar charger as a gentle reminder there should be few problems.

I was glad to hear that goats are easily impressed by hot wires as one of my ideas is to greatly enlarge the size of my front yard and to fence it in with vinyl "stock fence." I talked to a guy who runs his own cattle and sells fence and he tels me that much of the low cost and mid grade fencing that doesn't have pressure treated wood reinforcement will get pushed over, dissassembled, or other wise rendered inop by cattle unless you have a hot wire on it as well. Goats would climb through or over it. I really don't want to have to put goat wire on the nice looking fence(looks like a good white painted wood horse fence.)

So that leaves adding hot wires to try to make the "ornamental" fence goat proof. I will hang hot wires between the horizontal "planks" of the fence unless some one has a bretteer idea to share. The fence guy said the main problem with cows is that they will stick their heads between the horizontal planks and push on the fence, either pushing it over or popping one of the horizontals out. Hence a hot wire between the planks. Hopefully goats won't eat the vinyl fence!!!

Do you think the little fiberglass wands with a hot wire or two strung between them would keep goats in after they were trained to hot wires? I don't really want to have to have a second regular fence around the house closer in to keep the goats out of the landscaping but wouldn't mind the unobtrusive F/G wands with hot wires.

I wonder how high of an obstacle a pygmy goat would jump over?

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]