Pygmy Goat Fencing Lessons

Having three pygmy goats, I've learned three important lessons about fencing them in that no one ever told me.

1. Goats laugh at EDIT: poorly installed electric fencing. This of course is subject to a number of different factors. If I had five lines of high-tensile wire, evenly spaced 12" apart with 6,000 volt fence controller, that'd be a different story. I have three lines of untightened 17-gauge wire on $1 fiberglass posts and a $20 controller from Tractor Supply. My buck Kodiak and my doe Hannah both managed to run through it without a problem.
2. Goats can jump. My african pygmy goat Mack managed to jump a 36" gate on his pen. I know that 36" is really low. However, he's just a lil' guy and I really didn't know he had it in him. So, the moral of this lesson is to go to 48" on your gate.
3. If you don't feel a shock from the electric fence, your shoes are grounding you. After hours of "testing" my fence by grabbing it, I was disappointed at the nearly non-existent shock. I nearly returned the unit, until someone pointed out the afforementioned lesson. Turns out it wasn't defective at all. Ouch. And as a sidebar, never, ever touch the grounding rod (in my case, a 6' pure copper rod hammered completely into the ground) and the fence wire. I learned that lesson the hard way. Ouch. Again.

I created a pen today out of some old woven wire fencing and some already standing posts for my african pygmy buck Mack. It's working pretty good, especially since it was an overgrown garden and he's having a field day eating the dried up plants and weeds. Other than the minor setback of the gate being jumpable, it seems to be working quite nice.

I still have issues sufficiently fencing in Kodiak and Hannah, my pygmy mixes. They are much... thicker than Mack. They need more room than he does, therefore, they need a larger section of the pasture fenced off. My electric fence is really the only thing I have, and it's only 17-gauge with a cheap $20 Tractor Supply controller. I can't afford to spring for regular mesh wire and post fencing right now (at least for a month) so I really need to make something work with my electric fence.

Tomorrow's project will be fixing Mack's gate so it's significantly higher and stronger. This should make a nice temporary home while I finish the project of fencing in the entire pasture with wire and posts. I also will be setting up the electric fence again for the other pygmies. This time, I'm using five wires, line tighteners, wooden fence posts, anextra grounding rod for increased shock, and visibility flags. They got through the fence last time, but this time I'm building the divider much stronger and tenser. This fence needs to go up to divide off a section of the pasture so I can separate the bucks and does. I want the fence up to be a divider that can easily be removed.

Anyhow, I'll update the blog. This goat-keeping project is starting to wear me down (already!)