Any advice on making a cattle grid?

I would check to see that your dog *can?t* cross a cattle grid first. Some dogs are smarter/more agile than others.

Tim

Round bars deter dogs better than flat topped ones. However, one of my dogs learnt how to get across by using the flat edge of the grid for two legs. And I have heard tell of dogs rolling across...

Bill

Think carefully about the side "fences", need to be over grid with no lip the dog can walk along. I used gates which could be closed but need to plan for the posts when you are building it. I had one made up locally and dip galvanised, I think they used some old

In message snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>, snipped-for-privacy@aolbin.com writes

Why are you confident your Dog won't simply jump across? Geriatric?

You used to be able to use a radio controlled collar but I think they relied on an electric shock and may have been banned.

I guess he's tied its back legs together

Bill

I vividly remember a story about how a circus trainer got a tiger to walk on bottle tops. he started with a plank, and gradually cut away the bits in between

At one time we had a dog shocker that hit the dogs near the boundary. The big dog caught a whiff of bitch on heat and off he went.

And hour later he trotted back broke into a run and there was a massive yelp and he shot a couple of feet in the air as the shock collar got him, but he still made it back in.

Moral. I don't think you have a cats (dogs?) chance in hell of keeping a dog in with anything less than an unclimbable barrier.

Exactly - 2 m isn't far for a dog to leap, and what is more likely is he will try and break a leg

yup. now banned. Stupid, they mostly actually worked.

It does very much depend on the dog, though. I recall having kittens when a small collie cleared a local cattle grid on to the road. OTOT a cattle grid with only two round bars would keep my wife's elderly Bichon Frises in.

Guidance available on the internet:

I've often wondered, how do cows and sheep learn not to attempt to cross cattle grids without getting their hooves stuck?

Not just dogs. There was a report (on Look North, I think) many years ago of sheep repeatedly escaping from a field. It turned out that they'd learned to tuck their legs in and roll over the cattle grids.

Is it a visual thing?

There's a youtube video of police horses objecting to a rainbow-painted zebra crossing.

Owain

Max Demian <max snipped-for-privacy@bigfoot.com wrote

They don’t learn, they don’t even try to cross it.

Herbivores aren't exactly what you might call rocket scientist material.

The dog will be able to cross any cattle grid. A friends red setter climbed a 14 foot brick wall to get to a bitch on heat.

Horses will spook at all sorts of things. An A4 sheet of paper turning over in a wind will do it.

I had some farmland (now part of Heartwood forest!) where the field edge bridleway skirts some drainage ponds. Regularly there would be a set of hoof prints through the crop where a horse had baulked at passing the ponds.

Quite possibly. This link, which I posted earlier refers to virtual cattle grids, painted on the ground. However, it doesn't say whether cattle need to have encountered real grids before or not:

Slightly different, I know, but a colleague who was brought up on a farm (where his older brother used to make him test electric fencing by touching it) tells me some of their cattle were smart enough to barge another cow into an electric fence to knock it down.

In the summer, a brown leaf would do it for one of mine. She once backed right off a "contour" path on to a 40 degree wooded downhill slope because of one. To her eternal credit, instead of dumping me she then turned uphill, dug in her back legs, and clambered out while keeping me nicely balanced.