haunted by hot wire

Okay, this hot wire is supposed to bring me some peace, so I don't have to yell at the horses for doing full-body-contact scratching on the poor old pasture fence (totally futile, by the way, yelling at horses from a distance).

So far I've dislocated my thumb (3 weeks ago and it's clearly going to take a LONG time to recover) and sent 8800 volts of electricity running through my body, I could feel it all day and it made my arm smell funny. That was exciting. Several smaller zaps too.

Last night at 4:23 I awoke to the sound of the fence charger clicking fast and LOUD. What the heck? This new one is pretty quiet. The first one was too strong, and soooo loud. This one's not bad. In the daytime you'd have to stand near it to hear it, and it's a pleasant little "bink! bink! bink!" sound with a blinking green light. I can hear it at night if I listen for it, gently ticking in the shed, but it's not so loud that it fills every nook and cranny of silence in my bedroom at night like the other one did. So for it to wake me up, that's unusual. Groan. Did I really want to get dressed and go walk the fence line? No. I put a pillow over my head. I could still hear it. I put two pillows over my head. I could still hear it. I shut the window. I couldn't hear it, but I was now obsessed with it. Was something shorting it out? What could it be? Eventually I fell asleep.

So this morning the first thing I did was checked the charger box, which was softly binking away like always, didn't seem any faster or louder than usual. Weird. Did I dream the whole thing?

I never did find a short, but I did find this. What the heck?!?!:

Hmm, that's a problem. That's a significant problem:

Okay, let's make a list of everything that had access to that particular fence post last night:

-the cats
-the ducks
-the wild turkeys, and other assorted wild birds
-one broody bantam hen
-Gwen

Now, not to point the finger of blame or anything, but I think it doesn't take too much thinking to know who did this, not to name names or anything, ahem:

(not sure why there's a red glow in this pic either).

This section of fence tests at 3400 volts. All I can say is I HOPE THAT HURT!!!

Ah, fence update, since I'm done for the morning:

2856 feet to be hot wired
1112 feet currently hot
insulators installed on remaining 1744 feet (yay done pounding insulators!!!! Just need to run wire now!)

Edit 4:12pm, Huh, interesting. Apparently the loud clicking last night was NOT the fence charger, it was water dripping from the leaky gutter on the barn (water? from where?) onto a metal gate that I propped there yesterday morning. Mom heard it too, and went out to look last night. I wondered why the gate had was on the ground this morning! Come to think of it I did hear a loud noise last night, I just dismissed in my half-asleep state as a horse kicking the fence or something. Ironic that something really was wrong with the hot wire this morning. Go figure.