Probably true. Although the cow usually touches the fence with her nose, a sensitive area. Pigs, on the other hand stick their heads under the wire, squeal like hell and just keep going, ususally breaking the wire.
Oh, hell yes. The teacher used to wire up lockers to a static generator; carry around a charged up Leyden Jar, ask a girl to hold it while holding hands with a boy. The test was to see if in such a situation the boy’s hand was steady enough to feed the chain attached to the lid down into the mouth of the jar.
Today there would be a police investigation and charges filed by the County Attorney. (States Attorney or District Attorney to many of you.}
I too played with electric fences in my youth and remember that, a bit like with grasping nettles, it is most unpleasant if you lightly touch the wire - you receive a crackling shock - while if you grab the wire and hold it, the shock is a more tolerable throbbing (still none too pleasant…).
So if I was gripping an electric fence, hand throbbing away, and tapped a passerby lightly, I reckon it would hurt them more than I. I would guess this was down to the electricity arcing across to their flesh, in a similar vein to the cheap office trick of charging yourself up with static from the carpet and touching a co-worker’s exposed skin.
My brother and I used to grab the electric fence and our arms would shake, we would hold each others hands and get a shock that way. Once, my mother was going to grab us and she got a shock too. The voltage was just enough to keep the cows away. We were bare foot too!
I’ve only messed with consumer type electric fences which send something like a one second shock every five seconds, used to keep in goats, dogs, and the like.
Just holding your average, say lightning bug, about (if memory serves) 1/8" from the wire would result in an arc which fry and smoke the bug, with hardly any affects to my fingers.
I know it sounds evil but I was a kid and the only reason I tried it was because while my “Radio Shack 250 in 1”'s high voltage generator was good enough to shock me with a 9 volt battery, it wasn’t enough to fry a bug with even four 9v batteries in series.
My friend’s farm had a new type of fence years (20?) ago. It was a nylon rope with wire wove into it. If it broke you could tie a knot to repair it. Most certainly impossible to do with high tension wire.
Got to wonder if it has a much kick as a regular fence right? I put out my index finger to tap it, the electricity curled my finger around it. As I pulled my arm back the rope fence stretched back. I couldn’t make my finger straighten. Brooooown Brooooown three or four times I pulled back and forth before my hand snapped free.
I worked on a farm for six years after that and never ever touched a live fence again.
I have to interject with my favorite playing-with-electricity story ever.
My high-school physics teacher was one of those crazy rural kids. He and his brother just had a big pit out back where they would blow all sorts of stuff up. When he got into his teens and started driving, he thought it would be a hoot to hook up the car battery to the chassis so he could give unsuspecting folks electric shocks. Much hilarity ensued.
Then, one day, he had a girl in the car with him. She knew about the trick wiring, and told him to turn it on to shock the next guy who was coming up to the car.
It was a gas station attendant. He was about to start fueling up the car.
My physics teacher realized it at the last second and hit the kill switch. He took the trick wiring out that night. I don’t think he took that girl out again.
Back in oh 1984 we had electronics class in grade school.
The teacher had one of those hand crank electric generators and would have the whole class make a chain holding hands and the kids on each end would hold onto the terminals.
He would then turn the crank slowly and progressively faster till somone would let go. That person or persons were out and the chain of kids got smaller till there were only a few kids left then finally one kid.
I always thought that kid that always won the game had a screw loose.
You’d think the teacher had a sadistic streak in him but it more of the students begging him to play the game at the end of class.
If it weren’t for the “grade school” comment, I’d swear you were a former student of mine! I used to do this in my physics class. The football team would show up at lunch to “test their manhoods.” I used to observe that pretty soon, they’d all be sitting around at a party, passing a 9 volt back and forth, doing “hits” on their tongues.
Back in the olden days, it was too hard to go downstairs and remove a fuse… we worked on wires ‘live!’
Ok, I know I’m not supposed to do that, but I can’t tell you the number of shocks I’ve gotten from live circuits. Light switches, electrical outlets, and an outside light that I even metered prior to touching the wires! (Didn’t do it on the right setting of course, hence the shock there)
My worst was having my forearm come into contact with a 10K microFarad tank capacitor charged to 18V. A nice nasty shock to the arm, two burns at the points of contact, and the rest of the afternoon off. We used to short them with a screwdriver, and this time, I forgot to do it, as I was removing another from a huge power supply. The screwdrivers would often ‘weld’ to the terminals when we shorted them out. Lots of electrons!
You crazy farm kids, lol. I can’t believe anyone would play with those stupid things! When my landlord moved his horses back in he told me he would not be turning the electric fence on. Apparently he changed his mind. My kids and I were feeding the horses today, one threw an apple piece but the dumb horse couldn’t find it so I reached in to pick it up and feed it to him. The fence zapped me across my back under my shoulder blades. I screamed, fell down and cried. Freaked my poor kids out. I was going “Mommy is ok, I’m just gonna lay on the ground for a little while.” My whole body went numb for a good 6 minutes and my back is really sore! I’m so glad my kids didn’t touch it!
Now I know why the horses wouldn’t come over to the fence… and not to trust my landlord, lol.
I talked another kid into peeing on an electric fence once (“betcha can’t hit that fence from here”). He felt it.
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My favorite Will Rogers quote:
“There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”
Yes, I know I’m replying to a couple of zombies, but what the hell.
Although an energiser can put out >100, 00 volts, the ampage is tiny, commonly 500 milliamps, certainly less than 2 amps,and the current only flows for <1/10 of a second. Nowhere near enough to knock even a child on their arse.
Because we have all actually done it, multiple times. Why in the world do you think that everybody is lying about this? It takes some courage to grab an electric fence for a game, but it’s doable by an 11 yo child.
Nope.
The wired earth/negative system is used when the ground is too dry to provide a sufficient earth. The earth wire provides a way to complete the circuit through the skin. But if the ground is moist you will get exactly the same shock if you just touch the hot wire as in a system without the wired earth.
To “burn off” grass and weeds you need less than 1 volt at about 50 milliamps: enough to disrupt the cell membrane. It’s certainly not evidence of some sort of “power”.
How did that happen? I assume you were wearing a metal watch and it came into contact; 18 volts is nothing unless you put it to your tongue. Actually, from personal experience, even a 10,000 uF capacitor at 18 volts won’t be enough to blow up a watch like that and cause burns; it contains only 1.62 joules of energy, even when I discharged a 680 uF capacitor charged to 380 volts (49 joules), it only left a couple small pits in the piece of metal with no significant heating (a car battery is a very different matter though).
Personally, cases like watches or rings shorting car batteries or welders aside, I consider contact with any voltage under 50 volts (DC) to be safe in almost any situation, except for wet hands/large contact area/tight grip; 100 volts for incidental contact (touched lightly with a finger, which actually doesn’t feel like much with 120 VAC either, although it will make you jump if you aren’t expecting it).
Also, don’t use screwdrivers to discharge capacitors, especially when in electronic circuits, use a resistor with a resistance of around 1 ohm per volt, limiting discharge current to 1 amp (discharge time is about 1 second to 0 volts for 10,000 uF and 18 ohms, or 5xRxC; resistor can be 1 watt for this example, 5 watts for the one I gave; wirewound resistors in particular can handle very high peak power dissipation).
I ran through one when I was a kid. I’m guessing I must have hit it hard enough to break something, so I got no shock whatsoever (chasing a footy a mate kicked over my head)
If you want a good kick, wrap your fingers around the contacts while pulling a plug out from mains power. I was intending to defrost the freezer, climbed around behind it and grabbed the plug to disconnect it. Plug was a bit tight, so wrapped the fingers around and with the plug half withdrawn my fingers made contact with the contacts.
Wow.:eek:
Shoulder blocked the freezer across the kitchen and managed to get enough control of my hand to finish pulling the plug out. Had the twitches for the next hour.
Old Farm boy here. I am having a hard time understanding why anyone would get cross wise of an electric fence on purpose? They hurt.
I have had to go through an fence when I was a kid by steping between the wires and making sure not to touch the wires. Most of the time we could make it through. But every once an a while a barb would catch and penitrate the crotch of my pants. And when it did you could not jump or it would get worse. Had to take the zap and get the rest of the way through. So I never played with them.
The way to test an electric fence is to use a long blade of green grass. One hand on the ground the other holding the blade by its end. Put the tip on the wire and slid the grass up the wire. If the fence is not shorted out there should be some feeeling of shock when the grass is first placed on the wire. If the fence has a short in it you may have to slide the grass up the wirre before you can feel any thing. The futher up the wire the closer tothe point where the short is.
