TOTTERING FENCES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 669, 2 May 1952, Page 16

TOTTERING FENCES

by

SUNDOWNER

APRIL 2

DON’T know which surprises me most-the fences on so many Canterbury road lines or the patience of those who suffer from them. I helped the other day to drive a mob of sheep about three miles and in that short distance there weré seven gaps two or three yards wide ‘closed by loose stretches of barbed wire. Sometimes there were two wires,

sometimes only one, Dut in every case there was an invitation to sheep to

break through; as they of course did. The attitude of the owners no doubt is that two barbed wires will stop cattle, and that as dairy farmers they are not interested in sheep. But it is a stupid attitude, and anti-social. There is hardly a dairy farm in Canterbury whose road fences could not be made secure for less than the price of one cow, but if it cost two or three cows the job would still be worth doing. I am thinking par~4

ticularly of holes in gorse hedges, which a single hurdle would stop; but the trouble is that holes in fences usually mean holes in our heads and in our characters. They are there not because we are poor, or overworked, or unable to obtain materials, but because we are lazy, or selfish, or muddlers, or bad neighbours. * * *

APRIL 3

FRIEND to whom I mentioned the fences of Canterbury asked me if I had heard of Rip Van Winkle. Driving sheep on the roads, he argued, is a prehistoric occupaton, and ought to be a public offence. "If you drove a bullock waggon through Cathedral Square

u would be _ arrested, ‘and the day is not far off when it will be counted

as Clazy to arive sheep on the pubic (continued on next page)

highways. In any case, it is no use blaming bad fences for useless dogs." There was substance in his last sentence if not much, yet, in his first; but fences have caused trouble since the first man enclosed a garden. I don’t think there was a-fence round Eden, but there were "tottering fences" in the days of King David-and I feel sure, continuing rows. about them. It was never easy for one -man to keep off the grass of another man, and it is not easy yet. Every schoolboy used to know about the enclosure squabbles in England, which lasted in one form or another for five hundred years; but it surprised me to discover in America that fences are still inflammable in the Middle West. The question there is not fences of no fences, but fencing by me or ng by you. They do not, as we do here, fence all the land along all the roads, but enclose those areas only in which livestock are kept. But they still fight about the financial responsibility for the fences. Must livestock men fence their animals in or corn, fruit, and potato men fence them out? As far as I could see it was the hogs and cattle that paid, the corn and. ‘potatoes that went free; but I was told that the fires still smouldered in the wider open spaces. The soil-tillers argue that those who run livestock should be responsible for the damage their animals do if they ate allowed to wander. The cattlegrazers say that they were the first occu-

piers, that the cultivators came with their eyes open and" must protect themselves if they choose to sit down and grow crops in grass country-always the best of the grass country. It was a serious, and very dangerous, conflict 70 or 80 years ago, when fencing meant posts and rails in country that produced ‘no timber; but it can, I gathered, heat "the blood still. Not many of the wire fences I saw were what we could call good fences in New Zealand: the posts were light and wide-spaced, the wires usually slack and rusty, But they could hardly have cost a fifth of the expense of fencing in wood. And they don’t have to keep out driven stock, which are never seen on theroads. * % *

APRIL 5

HE correspondent who told me last year about her twelve-years-old hen

and twenty-six-years-old pregnant pony, wrote again yesterday to sav

that the hen had died. "She was hatched in September, 1939, so. was well into her thirteenth year. She roosted early’ on Monday night, was not very bright on Tuesday, and on Wednesday sat all day in the warm corner in. which we put her and died that night, We buried her in one of my old aprons-in a leaflined grave. . . Because she was a Leghorn she never sat, but this spring we put her with 18 perching pullets when we bought them in November, and no hen could have mothered them better. She called them to everything she found, and took them everywhere she went. I don’t know whether

that hurried her end or not. Before we put her with the chickens she was remarkable for her cunning in securing the best pieces of food. But running about with the chickens for four months, and surrendering the best food, made her noticeably thinner. I hope it kept her happy. * % *

APRIL 6

(CONVERSATION at milking time: "Wouldn’t Elsie look funny in a frock?" "Doesn’t everybody look funny in a frock?" "Do you think so?"

"You would think so too if you still had the eyes the Lord gave you."

"Who gave me my eyes?" "The Devil." "I don’t follow you." "You don’t want to." ¥ "I hate crazy people." "So do I. That’s why I hate what we have become." "But we were talking about clothes." "Unnecessary clothes. The clothes we don’t require for warmth, The Devil’s clothes." "Why do you harp on the Devil? Do you think we should go naked?" "No. But I think we were born naked. I think it was blasphemy to call nakedness unclean. Clothes are unclean-a reminder every time we put them on that we don’t believe in God." z "I think it is time to feed the fowls." | (To be continued)