The Mysterious Case of the Missing Electric Fence

I was always a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I have a collection of Sherlock Holmes mysteries where the deductive reasoning of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solve cases that befuddled Scotland Yard.  Sherlock Holmes paid attention to every minute detail in solving cases as he famously said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

That leads us to the mystery that we have at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  We like to wait until May to mow.  I have a solar powered fence charger, shown below, that charges up a reel of poly wire rope strung on temporary, step-in posts.  I set these paddocks up and run the cows through the yard over roughly a week.  By the time they've made it through the yard in a week, the first paddock has grown up and is ready to be grazed again.

The cows have learned, like Pavlov's dogs, that the sound of the reel unwinding the wire rope means that they will soon have access to fresh, tender White Dutch clover, and they begin to moo loudly, impatiently.  Here they are in all their glory in the first paddock of spring:

At night, I put them back in the permanent pasture, but leave the temporary fencing in place. Yesterday something bizarre caught my eye.  There was no wire hanging between the posts.  I did a double take and walked over to look more closely.  The solar charger was still there, fortunately, but the reel and all the wire was gone!  Of course this photo is before the "Great Fence Heist."  If you look closely, you can see a post near the road and then if you look to the right of that one, you can see a post between the crepe myrtle and the telephone pole.

At this point I'm getting a little angry, thinking, "I can't believe someone stole my fence!  Nothing like that has ever happened before.  I felt violated and began thinking, "It is time to get a Ring doorbell camera and an outside camera as well."  Between the Gallagher fence reel and the wire rope, the value missing is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $75-$100.  The solar charger is worth more than that.  Why would you leave that?

The solar charger was close to the house.  Perhaps the thief was too chicken to come close to the house with our dog, not to mention that we might (we do) have firearms.  They could have just stood by the road, grabbed the wire rope, attached it to their truck hitch and the wire rope, reel and everything attached would be pulled to the road where they could throw it in the back of their truck and escape.

But when I walked to the road, I noticed a couple of clues that made me re-think my theory.  Namely, the two poles near the road were bent, and there were tire track marks that clearly showed grass mashed down.  Someone had driven off the road, through our fence and bent the poles in the process.

Upon this happening, the fence probably got caught around the suspension of the vehicle and as they motorist regained control, he (or she) unwittingly drove off pulling 350 feet of poly wire, a reel, and several broken poles bouncing behind them.  Tricia and I got in the vehicle and drove due east.  We saw nothing.  We drove due north and due south.  Again nothing.  All would be good if we could've found the reel, but we didn't.

My thinking is that the driver was either impaired or distracted when they hit our fence.  They didn't want to come back and apologize and/or "face the music."  I was hoping that once they got a safe distance away, they would have pulled over, cut the fencing away, and left everything in the ditch somewhere, but no dice.  We couldn't find any evidence.  We could sure use Sherlock or Dr. Watson to help us solve the mystery.

Until then, we'll likely get a camera and install.  We'll still run the cows through the yard.  I do have another reel and more wire rope.  But we'll operate a little smarter and we'll roll up the fencing and put it all in the garage until the following day.  "Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me."  We're just happy that the solar charger came unhooked from the fence.  That would have been a shame to have lost it!