Early last year I was tilling away in a llama pen to try it out as a garden space. We grew some corn in it, but did not have the luck I had hoped for. Anyhow, when I was done tilling, I noticed the pile of hay that had been left on the ground in the gateway, so I decided to level it off with the tiller as I passed through at the end of the job. Well, darn the luck, I hit the jumper wire that carried the current for the electric fence from one side of the gate to the other. That killed a small section of fence between the llamas and where I have their hay stacked a couple of feet in front of their pen. Low priority repair to make, especially as it was spring, and the llamas were just moved across the street.
Fast forward to today, new bales of grass hay are stacked in that spot, and the grass across the street is not long enough to support the llamas at this time. When I went out to get the hay for animal feeding, I noticed a sizeable chunk missing from the bottom bale. Our brown and white llama, Flossy, stuck her head through the fence and partook right there in front of us! Priority repair now!
My eight year old got a lesson on voltage and amperage, and what the job of an insulator is as we put in a new jumper wire under ground from one side of the gate to the other. We put tension back on the fence, too, and then turned the electric back on and sat and waited a few minutes till Flossy returned to the scene of her mischief.
It did not take long till Flossy came back to rob more hay. She put her head through the fence, then stepped forward. When her neck finally pressed hard enough for the fence wire to reach through her fiber and into her skin, she twitched a little, then pulled back, put her head up, then shook it. I don’t think she liked the bite of the fence, but she does like hay though, so she tried again with the same result.
We knew then that it would work, so we packed up our tools and put them away. That served as a first part of little one’s homeschool lesson for the day, and then we came back out to go through her flash cards with her sight words on them. She got through them fairly well, and not once were we distracted by a llama trying to get through an electric fence to get to the hay. That means it is working properly, and doing its job.