Maybe Goats Should be Allowed to Run Free?

Since they can't be contained.  Good Lord, I am royally sick of trying to contain my goats. The electric fence has been fixed again, and seems to be working at 50% capacity, anyway, but it does no good whatsoever. Might as well not even be there. The goats go underneath the fence.

We didn't know diddley-squat about fencing when we put up the fences, and we didn't research it as well as we should. Here's a note to all you would be farmers out there: there's nothing wrong with researching something, even as seemingly simple as field fencing. "How hard can it be?" is not research. You don't weave the field fence over the t-posts, you keep it all on one side and use the clips. (pictures of the wrong way to follow; please don't bust a gut laughing at us.) Even when you do it the right way, two people simply cannot pull a fence tight enough to stay taut. You have to use a truck or a tractor. And that means that yes, you actually DO have to sink wooden corner posts in concrete at all four corners. And wait for the concrete to dry. 

If you don't do all that, then the fence will get all loose and wobbly, no matter how tight you think you have pulled it. It's like filling a grave: you take out dirt, you put a body in the hole, you put all the dirt back, and yet still the hole isn't full. How is it possible? I don't know, and I don't know how a taut fenceline goes all wobbly in a few weeks, either. So anyway, the goats can slip under the loose edge of the fence. We would have to take the entire fence down to fix it, and that's just not in the immediate future. So I jimmy-rigged a temporary solution. I bought about a hundred of those heavy wire "U" shaped things, they are some kind of landscaping tool, and I went around tacking down the edge wherever it was floppy. 

I really hope it works at least for today, because I have to drive to Seattle and I'll be gone all day long. Yesterday the damn goats killed two more fruit trees and there aren't many left to kill!