Fence Tape and Cow Brains

There’s an interesting practice in the cattle industry on the North Island of New Zealand that allows for easy movement of cows from one field to another.

Rather than building costly and unwieldy fences, ranchers will leave one section of the fence unbuilt and instead have a line of tape extending across the gap at the cows’ eye level.

The cows, not understanding that this tape would be easily broken by the pressure of their applied weight, choose never to even test the barrier, figuring in their cow-brains that this limitation is just as solid and indefatigable as all the rest of the fence, which they’d given up trying to break years before.

Where’s the tape in your life?

What’s the worst that can happen if you start testing barriers that you feel are insurmountable, but might not be?

Update: January 6, 2017

The Kiwis really do have a lot of wonderful ranch-related wisdom and terms. Number-Eight Wire mentality is another good one that I mention elsewhere on the blog, and which I still find use for periodically.





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