Fences

Over the holiday weekend, Kindra and I redid the electric fence around the dogs’ back yard.

The fence hasn’t worked in quite some time. We’re not sure when, but the breaker tripped and the controller has been as dead as a hammer, as my grandpa used to say.

It didn’t matter. Monroe and Martin had encountered electric fences previously and gave it wide berth. For them, it was as effective as if were still crackling with electricity.

Martin’s experience was on this wise:

Several years ago I put up an electric fence around the turkey pen as a deterrent to coyotes, foxes, coons and anything else looking for an easy supper.

Martin got into it one day and went yowling into the woods, where he hid for a couple of hours.

It wasn’t long afterward that I put a chain link fence around the back yard. Martin was good about staying inside, but Monroe was a different story.

When she came to live with us, she climbed over the five-foot chain link with ease and was more than willing to dig her way under, if necessary.

So I put up the first electric fence around the back yard. I’m not sure when she got into it, but she has given the fence plenty of distance ever since.

Enter Reno, the puppy who was dumped at our house a couple of months ago.

He has grown enough to hang out in the back yard with the big dogs, but he had no experience with electric fences.

Having no fear of it, he would try to step through it and would succeed, since it wasn’t working.

Martin and Monroe would see him, then would test the fence themselves and be off on a tour of the country. That’s why Kindra and I spent several

That’s why Kindra and I spent several hours rewiring the fence over the weekend, troubleshooting a new controller and putting in new step-posts.

Reno got to be loose in the backyard Monday afternoon and got into the fence in less than an hour.

He hollered and fled at high speed to the back porch and gave the fence plenty of clearance the rest of the day.

For Martin and Monroe, it was life as usual. They would look through the fence but stay several safe inches away.

Since then, I have thought a lot about Martin and Monroe and how they had been controlled by a false belief.

For a year, maybe a year and a half, they could have stepped through the fence and gone on many a doggy adventure.

But they didn’t. They stayed in the confines of their yard because they feared the wire, even though it wasn’t working.

I have been glad they did, because I didn’t want them running around the county, but I wonder how many times I have let myself be controlled by my personal electric fences, things I believed were true but might not have been.

Matters of politics, of faith, of honesty and of kindness.

As I get ready to start my eighth decade, I am more aware than ever of how important it is to seek the truth and to not be controlled by dead fences.