When the Electric Fence No Longer Pops

It's about that time of year where I begin separating our 3 acre pasture into paddocks.  The paddocks are separated by step in posts and temporary poly wire electrified by a solar charger.  From time to time, however, I'm greeted by a cow who isn't where she is supposed to be.  They've all been popped by the electric fence (and so have I), and so they (and I) respect it.

When a cow or all of them are beyond the electric fence, I know that the fence is no longer "hot."  I have a little trouble shooting routine that I go through to find and fix the problem.  Most of the time a branch has fallen across the perimeter wire and is grounding it.  So to find that I walk the perimeter fence to locate where the grounding out is occurring.

On this particular day, I didn't have to walk very far.  The problem wasn't that a stick had grounded it out.  It is that the fence wasn't grounded at all.  The ground wire coming off of the solar charger had fallen off of the ground rod.  This is how I found it:

The culprit, as you might have guessed, was Astro, the bull.  The ground rod is in the "bull pen."  Astro is at that age that bulls get where they like rubbing their head on everything.  Feed buckets we put in the pen are pushed across the pasture.  Anything solid in the pasture he can find, he rubs his head against it.  If you aren't very careful, he'll break everything he can get his head next to.  Astro had rubbed his head on the ground rod and knocked the ground clip off of it, rendering the fence un-grounded and unable to carry current.

The solution, in this case was simple - shockingly simple.  (Ha ha)I simply pulled the ground rod out of the ground in the pasture and put it ON THE OTHER SIDE of the fence and put the ground clip back on the rod.

This photo clearly shows that he can't get his head on the other side of the fence to knock the clip off.

For the time being, all is well once again.  But that's the thing with livestock.  Just as soon as you fix one issue, another one arises.  One must always be vigilant, anticipating problems and then working quickly to find solutions.