I noted yesterday that the sheep were crossing the wire willy-nilly. It seems they really don’t care much for it at all.
It’s time to review what I know about hotwire and what I can do about it.
First, hotwire only works because it is psychological. The animals don’t get hurt when they get zapped. It’s just startling is all. The hotwire itself is fairly weak and a cow could easily rip it. The height of the wire doesn’t matter much to a sheep, as they can easily jump over it. (I’ve seen cows jump over a 5′ fence before, too.)
How do you teach or train animals to avoid hotwire? There is a system that works pretty well, but the animals can “untrain” themselves if given the opportunity.
In my case, the sheep were pretty well trained to hotwire, but some of them have learned how to get by them pretty easily. Since sheep like to herd, this means the bad sheep are training the other sheep to break the rules too.
Greg Judy once said that as long as the sheep have plenty to eat, they won’t cross the hot wire. I have found this to be true.
I would add one additional caveat: Sheep don’t like to be near hotwire and will escape it if they feel even the tiniest pressure.
With this in mind, going forward, this is my strategy for hotwire.
- If the sheep don’t have enough grass, then I can’t use hotwire. I am going to have to use something else to keep them constrained. Since I always run out of grass in the winter due to the climate, I can only use hotwire during the growing season, roughly April-December. When I can’t use hotwire, I am going to have to use electric netting or something else.
- When the sheep are constrained by an actual barrier, such as electric netting or an actual fence, I can run hotwire about a foot inside the perimeter of the fence to train them to stay away from the fence and simultaneously to not bother the hotwire. This is because the way the sheep avoid the hotwire is they run right through it quickly. If there is a barrier on the other side, that won’t work, obviously.
- I’ll always make sure to give the sheep plenty of space within a hotwire area. I don’t know what will happen if the space is constrained while there is plenty of forage, but I suspect the sheep will break out. This may change how I do leader-follower with sheep and cattle.
- If the sheep start breaking through the hotwire, then it’s time to put up a physical barrier or move the sheep to fresh ground. There’s no other option, because the more they break through the less trained they will be.
Regarding the leader-follower system, I had the following idea. I’ll try to describe it, see if it makes sense to you.
Normally, when you move the animals with leader-follower, you setup a new paddock, move the leaders into that new paddock, then move the followers where the leaders were. This new idea simply gives more ground to the sheep, but extends their paddock by the amount that I give the cows each move. For instance, if I were giving 1/2 acre to the cows every move, then I could give 2 acres to the sheep.
Suppose the sheep were leading. They have a paddock that’s, let’s say, is 4x the paddock size for the cattle. Or using actual numbers, the cattle have 1 acre paddocks and the sheep have 4 acres. For a move, I would extend the sheep’s area by 1 acre. Then I would create a new paddock for the cows in the sheep’s area of 1 acre. Then I would move the cattle into the new paddock.
If the sheep were following, it would be pretty much the same. Create a new paddock for the cattle, move the cows in. Then extend the sheep’s area by the old paddock where the cattle were, and bring up the backfencing on the sheep by 1 acre.
This would give the sheep a greater amount of area at any given moment, but they would be consuming forage at the same rate as if I kept them in a smaller area. This might be enough to encourage the sheep to respect the hotwire.