News item on a local station last night

HI Brian We use a little battery-powered fencer to keep the local foxes out of our chickens. The 'hot' end consists of two big crocodile clips - one goes to the electrified wire or tape, the other goes to an earth stake (a short piece of copper pipe in our case). Any stray animals looking for a chicken dinner complete the circuit between the 'earth' and the high voltage wire..

All the fencers I've seen work this way - it's not unusual to have a mile or so of electrified fence, and the earth-stake is a convenient way of providing that second wire.

From a quick Google search, it seems that dry weather can cause problems - and a possible solution for this is to add a second 'earth' wire to the fence (recommended in one article for cattle, horses and bears (!))

- other fixes include watering the ground around the eatrth stake, alternative types of electric fencers, and praying for rain.

It's not usually a problem over here > Cows were a hazard to traffic having got out of their field yesterday due to

That's how the ones I remember worked, earth stake from the battery unit and zap you from fine wires embedded in a polypropylene string

No, the 'energizer' has an earth rod and then just a single wire runs round all the fences. If there were two wires you'd be dependent on the horse/cow/pig/whatever touching both wires. Two wires close together would be very difficult to maintain as well.

yes- that's why rubber Wellington boots were invented for farmers, innit?

Brian Gaff was thinking very hard :

No, the earth return, is the earth/soil itself.

Naah. They're to stop the sheep from walking away.

Just the one wire. And you get quite a kick.

Essential for aussies on isolated sheep stations in the outback.

Or hopefully, your brother does :-P

Rubber wellington boots (1853) predate the electric fence (1886-1905).

Allegedly there's another explanation involving the back legs of sheep.

Owain

Funnily enough our local farmer was telling me about an electric fence that was useless because of poor ground conductivity. He was planning to knock an earth spike in real deep.

Bill

You used a bit of grass to 'test' the electric fence. Still gave a belt though, even from a battery powered unit.

The problem is with the earth stake. Needs to go in further to encounter damp soil. Or soak the ground round it.

Is this something to do with discharging through a sheep, Wodney ? ;-)

Also the ground near the animals needs to be sufficiently damp. Hoof is probably fairly non-conductive without mud.

Owain

Yep. If you put the sheep's legs in the wellies it doesnt get a shock, because the rubber insulates it

The right answer, although as someone else already pointed out if the ground surface is dry enough its resistivity will be up as well.