The Electric Fence

As kids growing up, we had a lot of animals around our place

A cow to milk, a few pigs, and some chickens to chase

Every spring uncle Russell gave us some orphan lambs whose tails we would bob

But to keep all of these critters corralled and contained was a job

Till one day, dad came home with the greatest invention

To keep large animals in, was its stated intention

It was just a single wire from insulators strung

But it could intimidate a steer that weighed half a ton

Now cows are quite dumb, they just don’t have much sense

But they soon learned not to mess with our electric fence

When it first went up those bovines were all curious

But when they put a wet nose on that wire, they got shocked something furious

Yes, whenever they got to close to that line they’d take a few volts

And they soon figured out that they didn’t like those sharp jolts

So they stayed inside the fence, which was just fine with us

We no longer had to chase them, we wouldn’t even need to learn how to cuss

After a while we could even shut the power off during the day

So we wouldn’t get shocked when we went out to play

Now if you climbed over that fence you could get to the barn straight

It saved a lot of time instead of going around through the gate

One day Lynn said he needed me to get something from the barn

But that was just a ruse

Because as soon as I got astraddle that wire

He went and turned on the juice

written by Brent Satterthwaite 16 November 2013