Elec fence vs. Goats

[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]