We had an electric fence on my parent's farm when I was growing up, funny thing is people seemed to get bit more than the animals, seems the animals were smart enough to leave it alone after it bit once or twice. People on the other hand thought we were smarter than the fence. Funniest one I had happen to me was one spring we were fixing fence getting it ready to turn the stock out. My Dad had this big idea to wear his rubber boots (Yooper speak "Swampers"), I was wearing my normal work boots which at that time consisted of a pair of genuine Vietnam era Marine Corp issue jungle boots, a gift from an uncle who gave them to me 'cause he wore them enough in Nam and didn't care to take a trip down memory lane with them on. All went fine until after most of the day my feet were wet, dad's still dry, and yes he'd walk up to the fence and grab a hold of it, I'd cringe, he'd splice the fence, replace insulators and do a multitude of things one does when they're fixing fence. Comes down to the end and dad's short about three feet of wire to finish the job, without thinking he asks me to hand him a piece of wire....about three feet long please. I did, you can guess what happened, yep he starts YELLING at me cause HE got shocked.
Flat out funniest one I ever saw was we had a Paso Fino Stallion, we found out there wasn't much market for 1/2 Paso foals so we decided to only let him cover the Paso Fino mares we had and let the grade mares stay open for the year. To convince the stallion we were serious we ran a hot fence all they way around the top of his pen. One of the grade mares came into heat, she backed up to the gate on his pen, he thought the only gentlemanly thing to do would be to oblige her through the gate, one of them made contact with the electric fence. He squealed like I've never heard a horse squeal, sounded almost like a hog, the mare shot out from under him like a race horse leaving the gate. He ended up falling all the way over on his back, four hovvies in the air. Once he got up he walked around to the other side of his paddock, around the corner of the barn where he couldn't see any of the other horses, stood there all afternoon shaking his head back and forth.
After college I took a job with a dairy herd out in western Oklahoma. I learned different areas of the country have different practices. A common practice in Oklahoma was to run miles of electric fence around your wheat fields and run cattle on them through the winter, if you didn't have cattle you hired some out. Electric fences were almost like community property, we had wheat that was on sections where we had no buildings or power, but it was okay to hook onto the neighbor's fence. Part of cattle check was to test the fence. If it wasn't working you had to fix it. The standard procedure was each of the farm trucks had a steel post in it with a porcelain insulator, you'd use this to ground the fence out to allow you to fix it when you found something. The other hired hand and I spent one morning trying to find a problem with a fence, we figured out it was dead before where we hooked on. We stopped in and told the neighbors about it, they agreed to go one way, we started out the other down a common fence between their pasture and our field, found a few small things but nothing that fixed our problem. Eventually we worked our way around the quarter section. We ran into one of the owners, it was just before dinner, he stopped to find out how we were doing, we explained we weren't having much luck. About that time he cocked his head and said "did you hear that?" He reaches over and grabs a fence post, does a little jig and yells "I found it", seems the neighbors found the big problem that restored power to the section we were hooked on and at that moment we found that last little ground but forgot to lean the grounding post against the fence before touching it. The owner hopped in the truck and said "let's go and check the rest of the fence before dinner" Good thing he was driving cause we found a pretty big wash and since we were all looking at the fence seems no one was paying much attention to where the truck was going. Luckily some one noticed and yelled stop, the front bumper was hanging over the wash out, good thing we didn't run into it or we would of needed a front end alignment and maybe a new front 6" of Chevy truck.
Another Dairy I worked at had a owner that was an inspired amateur electrician, Bubba didn't have anything on him. One of his techniques was to run 220 Volt motors and such on a separate circuit that used porcelain receptacles that were normal 15 amp fixtures (two wire at that). I forgot that or didn't hear when he explained it. One day for some reason I had to unplug one of the fence chargers, when done I plugged it back into the nearest outlet...the porcelain. I really hated feeding stock in the back lot for the next week or so, every time I'd grab that stupid hot fence gate handle I'd get poked. Eventually the fencer burned out, some one figured out what happened and I got yelled at. With in a year I was in the Air Force, playing with bombs and explosives was safer than that darn electric fence.
