When we looked into getting goats, we were told “if your fence won’t hold water, it won’t hold a goat.” Having seen pictures of goats standing on car hoods and roofs… I believed it and decided that we would never own goats. What I did not realize is the number of other animals that need a fence “that holds water”.
When we moved onto the new property, we had a predator completely decimate our free-range chickens and ducks. It managed to get into the pens at night and kill off all of them. In this instance, it wasn’t about having a water-tight fence to keep animals in but to keep animals out. Predator-proofing is often the hardest part for us since we do build a lot of things with scraps and pallets. But we’ve finally got it figured out… I think.
One animal I never considered having to have a water-tight fence with was our rabbits. Given the number of times we have chased one around the field or scared one out from under the horse trailer… leads me to believe that they are a smaller version of a goat. Most people keep their rabbits in hutches or raised cages and while it makes sense and I have raised them that way for many years, we get more benefit from raising them in rabbit tractors. And while some of our rabbits do really well in that situation (the majority of them actually) we have a few that seem to get out no matter what we do.
The most recent escape route was through the roof of the chicken coop that we have the grow outs in. The lid to the nest box came unattached and they figured out they could move it and jump out. Before that, they found a tiny gap at the bottom of the cage and dug out. Before that, they figured out that if they hit the door just right, they could pop the latch. In the cage prior, they climbed up the chicken wire and crawled out the top. In the hutch, they moved the board that covered a hole in the bottom of the cage and got out. (The humans could barely move the board!!!) We also have a doe that is dead set on digging out of every enclosure she has been put in, no matter the size, and then trying to dig into the other rabbits’ enclosures.
As if chasing the rabbits isn’t bad enough, we have border collies that jump 4-foot fences and know how to use their noses to open gates and a pit bull that digs out of anywhere you put him. The kids climb fences and open gates to escape without adults. The majority of our work around the farm seems to be an endless game of finding all of the escape routes of the various animals and then fixing them and repeating the cycle the next day.
So I have come to the conclusion that if it won’t hold water… it won’t hold our chaos.
