Elec fence vs. Goats

[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]

[RichZ]

Actually the best way to keep goats fenced is to make them happy where they are. I have over 100 goats for my goat dairy, and all I have throughout my pastures is a four foot woven wire fence, Red Brand Non-Climb fence, held up with T-posts. My goats could jump it in a heartbeat if they wanted to, but they don't. My does have a cozy barn with organic hay and excellent feed, and excellent pastures. My eight bucks spend the summer in our woodlot, about three acres, and all that keeps them in, is an moveable 4 foot electric fence. But they have a nice shelter (an old travel trailer that I gutted) a nice stock tank that I clean out daily for them, and plenty of weeds and underbrush to browse on. I also give them goat mineral blocks to make sure that they get enough selenium. They keep my woodlot in great shape, have a ball in the woods and all I have to buy for them are the mineral blocks. I don't even give them any feed when they're in the woods. And they're in fantastic shape, they'll be well ready when it's time for them to get together with their girlfriends this fall.

Keep goats happy, and they stay where you want them to.

[Adron]

I think I have covered the keeping them happy part. Or at least I think so. I built them a 6' x 12' 3½ sided shed, put in a 4' 4 wire electric fence around about 2½ acre of brush. The shed is on skids so I can move it as required to go around the entire fence line. I thought as they cleared out this woodlot, I would build the next electric fenced enclosure and try to stay 1 enclosure ahead of them. By the time I reach the end of the fence line, I could start all over at enclosure #1 ..or not.

We have finally got about 5" of rain (basically 1st since May) in the last 4 days and the voltage has improved considerably. I believe this is because of the improved grounding now that the ground has some moisture. My cheapy meter shows over 4kv, but just a very small flash on the 5500v light. At least it says it is working. I'll borrow my neighbor's good meter and get a better reading. If this works it will definatly demonstrate the need for a good ground. Hmmm?? I wonder if I just watered around the ground rod that would help keep the better ground?

8 bucks on 4 acres?...I may not have enough goat power for the job. Oh well, adding or subtracting goats is the easy part.

[Pat]

Rich, Makes sense and if it works for you that is great. I was skeptical as I was thinking as I read the first part of your post that your goats were sticking around for the feed, drawn likke filings to a magnet. But wait... The rams don't get fed and are content to stay in your feedlot, content enough to respect a 4 ft electric fence which you say they could jump at any time if they wanted. This gives me hope that I might have a workable situation.

I want the goats primarily as "GREEN", i.e. all natural weed whackers. I was thinking of moving them around from location to location and having them clean out fence rows and in general reduce the brushyness of parts of my property. Temporary/portable electric fence sounds nearly ideal for that.

I have seen goats tethered to overhead wires similar to a clothes line where they can reach the base of a fence. Every couple days the overhead trolley system is moved to relocate the goats to a fresh section of fence. I'm not sure but suspect the lady took them off the leash at night or you'd think they would be easy prey for a coyote or whatever. I wasn't all that interested at the time so I didn't quiz the lady, just stopped because my wife saw a yard sale sign. The fence row was neatly cleared of weeds and briars which were heavy on the other side of the fence.

Maybe what I think I want to do will have to be sanity checked and modified to better take into consideration the attrubutes of the goats. I haven't had much to with goats, petted a few, looked at them but never raised or kept any. Better to study on the situation and get good advice than to rush in and do something dumb that was easitly preventable.

I had thought pygmy goats would be good for a few reasons: 1. they are cute and cute carries a lot of weight with my wife, 2. I thought pygmies might be easier to handle, 3. easier to keep penned in (shorter fences etc) This is speculation on my part (or wishful thinking) as in reality for all I know pygmies could be the ruffian scoundrels of the goat world.

How much goat-human contact time is required to keep the goats from getting person shy or hard to handle? I am very familiar with how horses get "stale" as I used to exercise horses for folks who didn't have time to ride enough to keep the horse used to taking commands. Sounds like fun? Not really, it is work because you are always trying to correct behavior flaws while simultaneously getting the horse used to being handled.

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

[RichZ]

Pat, with goats a lot depends on how they were raised. All of my goats are bottle fed from birth, and they basically see no difference between goats and people. That's typical with bottle baby goats. If you have a goat dairy or even someone raising dairy goats near you, they're probably bottle raising the kids. And, they typically have more bucks then they need, and sell the bottle fed bucklings cheap. If you get some of those bucklings and have them whethered (neutered), you'll have goats that will be people friendly for life. The neutering doesn't change their friendliness, but during breeding season, the bucks will smell rather musky, and they won't smell at all if they're whethered.