Towards a Sustainable Culture

A friend of mine has an electric fence around a piece of his land, and keeps two cows there. I asked him one day how he liked his fence and whether it cost much to operate. 'Doesn't cost a damn thing,' he replied. 'As soon as the battery ran down I unhooked it and never put it back. That strand of wire is as dead as a piece of string, but the cows don't go within ten feet of it. They learned their lesson the first few days.'
Apparently this state of affairs is general throughout the United States. Thousands of cows are living in fear of a strand of wire that no longer has the power to confine them. Freedom is theirs for the asking. Rise up, cows! Take your liberty while despots snore. And rise up too, all people in bondage everywhere! The wire is dead, the trick is exhausted. Come on out!

- E.B. White, One Man's Meat

That’s all well and good for Mr. White, but for a while this winter we were having a heck of a time keeping a couple of calves inside of our fence. The problem is that snow, ice, and general dampness messes with the current, causing shorts and also insulating the calves from the ground, so that they feel next to nothing when they touch the wire. Our fence charger is also fairly old, and not particularly powerful as, for a number of years, it was only being asked to contain a couple of the kind of well-behaved cows Mr. White describes. An electric fencing system is really designed to work best in spring/summer/fall when cows are generally on pasture. This wouldn’t usually be a problem in winter, because once cows have learned to respect a fence, you can unplug it. The calves here are fall calves, however, and they had not learned a proper respect for fences prior to coming here for the winter.

I have to admit, grudgingly, that I admire the calves who are not willing to accept the limits that their elders have grown accustomed to. I do, however, (as the farmer in this equation) have a responsibility to try to keep the calves where I want them. A neighbour showed me how to set up a two wire system where the top wire is live and the bottom wire is dead, but connected to a steel post in the ground. When a calf sticks its head between the wires -- as they like to do right before they walk through them and tear up forty feet of fence -- they complete the connection between the live top wire and the grounded bottom wire. My neighbour also lent me a more powerful fence charger to help get the message through to the calves' learning centres which are, much like our own, in their ass.

It seems to have worked, because the fencer has been disconnected for the past week and the calves are still keeping their distance from the wire.

Now if we want to talk about a metaphorical piece of wire with no charge left in it, how about systematic theology...