Keep ferals out and your livestock in

Why do we still fence in a way that is inadequate?

Here are the answers.

Time is our most precious commodity so we are in the habit of grabbing available materials and doing a quick job, without considering the end result.

Farmers have been teaching feral animals to go through wire for a hundred years now.

The animals are not scared of wire.

They know that if they keep trying, they will eventually get through.

Animals are the biggest threat to your fence, followed closely by the weather. 

Old Mother Nature is the toughest and you need a fence that has the best chance of survival.

That usually means the simplest and easiest to repair because nature usually wins.

You need a fence which can stand up to floods and fire, wind and terrible weather.

You need tough posts and single strand wire.

As a basic rule of thumb, if you can keep the ferals out, it is easy to keep your farm animals in.

Electric fencing does the job, according to a Feral Fencing spokesman.

"The challenge with electric fencing is training all the animals," the spokesman said.

"The domestic stock are easy enough.

"It's those pesky ferals who keep tangling the wire.

"They mostly do it because the farmer has made it easy.

"Roos and pigs don't know that you wasted your time running an offset wire along that old fence.

"They don't know that you put up that new fence and simply electrified some wires.

"Make the new fence look different, make it different to all the traditional fencing they have ever seen, make it different enough so they stop and think about the obstacle in front of them, then electrify it so that when they get brave enough to have a closer look it bites hard.

"If you make the new fence visible, and different to all the other fences in their life, they soon learn to go somewhere else."