There’s a history of fencing and electrification in our family, and the earliest example of this is my grandfather’s prize bull. <\/p>\n
This big mean bastard would break out of anything, and if the SOB started feeding in Gramma’s vegetable patch, you can bet your ass that someone was gonna get an asswhipping. <\/p>\n
Now, gramps wasn’t adverse to asswhippings, in fact he delivered them with a sort of a flair that you don’t see today- when MY father was of such an age, the asswhippings consisted of a couple of strands of barbed wire- dad’s back, all his life, looked like raw burger meat, having been flayed and healed badly over and over. By my time, it was usually the old man’s cane, a bamboo thing that hurt badly enough that you wished it were barbedwire.
\nNo, Gramps had no problem delivering asswhippings, but I suspect he was getting his own asswhipping, figuratively, as the bull had already worked it’s way through a whole goddamned row of leaf lettuce. Gramma was pissed.<\/p>\n
SO gramps bought a fence charger. We strung two lengths of wire, eighteen inches apart, one at the top of the existing board fence. <\/p>\n
We tied rags onto the wire at regular intervals so the bull knew it was there. Couple times it got hit, but it was still working out a way, and we could sense it. Finally, one day, we SAW the sonofabitch life up it’s hoof, and snap first one wire then the other. And walk on through. <\/p>\n
SO the old man got a mason jar of sorghum molasses, and soaked two ears of dried field corn in it. They soaked there a week, until the ears swelled up and the kernels were nearly popping off. <\/p>\n
Gramps tied those ears to the wires with red shop rags, and we sit back and wait.<\/p>\n
The bull, having just been carefully herded back into the pen, waits until we’re out of sight, and wanders up to the wire. We see it pick up a hoof to try to snap the wire, and then it spots the corn. <\/p>\n