Can Animals Hear Electric Fencing?
If you’ve never been around electric fences, you probably have a lot of questions about them.
One of the more common questions we hear about electric fences in the fence industry is can animals hear electric fencing. The answer might surprise you. Here’s what you need to know.
Animals Can Hear Electric Fencing - and So Can You!
The simple answer to the question of can animals hear electric fencing is yes. Animals can hear electric fencing, and that even includes humans.
If you stand close to an electric fence, you might hear several different sounds.
Sometimes, there’s a low hum, similar to what you might hear when you stand under powerlines.
Most of the time, however, if you stand close to an electric fence energizer, you will hear a clicking sound. This is the energizer generating the pulsed current that electrifies the fence.
Humans have much less sensitive hearing than most animals, but even we can hear electric fences.
Animals Don’t Know What’s Causing the Sound
The big difference between when you hear an electric fence and when an animal does is that you will probably understand what the noise is and what it means.
If you hear the hum of electricity or the clicking sound of an electric fence energizer doing its job, you’re going to understand that it’s electricity and that you should not touch the fence.
However, animals don’t understand or use electricity. So they don’t know that they mean there’s potential danger or that if they touch the fence, they will get a shock.
Modern nonlethal electric fences, fortunately, won’t kill animals if they do touch them, and usually, once they’ve experienced the effects of an electric fence once or twice, they’ll avoid them in the future.
So it’s not the sound of the electric fence that keeps animals away. It’s the shock they remember from the times they have touched one!
Electric Fences Creating Noise on Phone Lines
One of the potential problems of electric fences is that the noise we hear from them can also affect things like phone lines.
In fact, if you have an electric fence around your property and you have a phone system near that fence, you could have something called “noise on the line.” This is essentially electrical interference with the sound of your phone.
If you do experience this, you might need to speak to the phone company to find out if there’s a solution you can use to solve the noise problem.
