I was holding a water hose with a metal trigger handle, filling up a bucket with water. Bent over and touched the wire with my forehead. Touching the wire to your head is a definite no-no. Figured out what happened only because of a burning sensation across my forehead afterwards. That's why I forget things now. Most animals are smarter than that.
I was watching one of those Sunday morning farming shows, and the guy they were spotlighting that day said he put a perimeter fence around his garden fence, with 3 feet of spacing in between. He claims that deer have poor depth perception and when the encounter the outer fence, they don't realize that they could easily jump both. The thing that has stopped me from doing that is trying to figure out how to keep the grass cut in the space in between them. I guess I could weedeat it. Regarding your moose and bears...I've wondered if the bear would not just barge right on through. Using bacon as a bait sounds like a good idea.
I can smell somethin' cookin' all the way over here. Actually, that's rather frightening. I'll tell you what I did...more than once. The tester only has a 3' or so lead on it. So you can hook it over the lower courses and the probe will still reach the ground, but it's not meant to test a tall fence. Stupid me started with the top courses and tried to stick the probe in the ground. When it would jerk out of my hand, I would instinctively grab it...with the tester still hooked on the fence. After a while I was beginning to think that the tester was a waste of money, since I could just touch the fence with my fingers and cut out the middle man. I finally got some long wire, attached an alligator clip on one end to attach to the probe and soldered the other around a nail. Then the nail stayed in the ground--attached to the probe--and I would move the meter from one wire to the other (probably as designed.) They all tested real hot, but by then I kinda knew they would.
When we lived in Indiana, we would go to the Indy 500 Time Trials (never been to the actual race.) One time my dad got the bright idea of attaching a handkerchief to the antenna so we could spot our car when we left. It must have been a great idea, judging by the number of handkerchiefs we saw when we exited.
On my land up north, I planted lupines on both sides of the walkway to my camp. Finding that both moose and snowmobiles had trampled my garden area, I put up a short rope fence around the garden area, and not only did that keep the snowmobiles off of it but I never saw any moose tracks in my garden either. Now, if the lupines were something that the moose wanted to eat, that might have been another matter. But, seeing the rope, they decided it was easier to walk around it. Since this is a thread about black bears, I also planted some blueberries to supplement the wild blueberries that already grew there, but I have yet to see a berry, although I'm sure that they are producing berries because the bears get to them before I can. That's fine. While I might like to graze on some blueberries while walking around the land, I don't need them to survive, and I like seeing the bears. It's amazing how a 600-pound bear can pick a blueberry off of a plant without damaging the plant.
That's not a bad idea. I've got plenty of room to plant blueberries outside of the garden for the bear to munch on. In this part of the country, they don't ever go into a true hibernation, so may be in perpetual "grazing" mode versus "gorge to survive"mode.
People get the idea that they go dormant throughout the winter months, and that probably varies from place to place, according to the weather. But we have long winters in Maine, and the bears come out of their dens from time to time during the winter. I know, because I created a couple of bear dens that they moved into, and I had cameras pointed at them. They would step out of the den from time to time, and kind of look around. Actually, I know they have used one of them but am not sure about the other.
Yeah, a lot of people talk about bears "hibernating". They don't truly hibernate; they sleep through the winter here. The sows give birth in the dens, so they cannot be truly hibernating, as that would not be possible if they did. Like Maine, we have long winters and the bears occasionally come out during midwinter thaws to see if they can find food before re-entering the dens. With DNA evaluation, it is believed that polar bears developed from grizzly/brown bears, but they do not sleep at all. The females do den up to give birth but still manage to hunt through some of the winter months. I don't ever plant anything to draw bears or moose to the property; they are just here if they choose. If they don't damage things or endanger my family, I leave them be.
One of the advantages of running a metal fence or panels beneath the electric is that I attach them to T-posts, and can test the electric without even bending over by simply testing to the grounded metal fence or the T-post.
I was bragging about my electric fences, and I went out this morning and found that a moose had gone through the wire that feeds the fence from the charger and taken out the charger. Nothing is in the garden now, so I just put the charger away.