Why would you work this hard?

So I've had a plague of pigs running around; every day there were a few pigs that got out and did various things, like eat the chicken food or get into the corn field, and I couldn't figure out how they were getting out.  They'd trot back to their pen at the end of the day and I'd let them in. 

Maybe cow proof.  Not pig proof. 

 I finally figured out that it was this gate that was the problem.  The hog panel that the previous owner had wired across the bottom might have worked for cows, but the pigs just considered it a mud flap and walked right under it, pushing it out of their way.  And this brings me to my biggest pet peeve with whomever put these gates up: 

This is NOT my preferred way to stop the gate from being lifted off the hinges.  Just sprayed it with WD40; it was rusted solid. 

 The way that these gates are mounted, all of them, allow them to be picked up off their hinges with a straight lift.  Now cows might not do a straight lift, but that's what pigs are best at.  A pig will insert her nose into the gate, raise her head, and the whole gate comes crashing down.  The pig waits for the noise to die down, and then walks out to do whatever she wants. 

Now the previous owners weren't completely oblivious to this, so on some of the hinges they drilled holes and inserted a pin, or actually threaded the top of the hinge pin and put a nut on, as shown in the picture above.    Some of the gates have pins holding them in, some are welded, some have nothing, some have the nuts.  It's a lot of work, time and effort, when all you have to do is install the gate as shown in the last picture.  I can take that gate off the hinges too -- you loosen the bracket clamped to the gate and just slide it up or down.  Simple, easy, and you don't get surprise visits from your livestock. 



Replacement gate, hinges property mounted (click for bigger view)

Just a note: I'm about as cheap as you get.  I hate spending money unless there's a really good reason.  but I buy the heavy duty gates because I've had pigs and cows walk through the lighter grade stuff.  It's not a savings to buy a lightweight gate if your average livestock weighs 400lbs or more. 

So as I'm working on this gate replacement I take a good look at the wall of the barn to my right and I see this: 

rusty nail sticking out of barn wall

This is just plain bad.  There are a lot of nails sticking out of this wall, a good 25 or 30 of them, they're all sharp and rusty, and they're sticking into the animal part of the barn.  Any one of them is a puncture wound and infection waiting to happen for both man and beast.  So I set aside my gate work for a few minutes and use a grinder to grind all of the nails flush with the boards.

This place held 400 cows as recently as 3 years ago; these nails were here then, too.  I'm a little astonished.  You don't need this type of problem when you keep any kind of animal - if nothing else it just adds to your workload.  Little emergencies all day.  Who needs that? 

It's been this sort of stuff that's been my primary focus for the last two weeks.   As soon as I have the animals secure I'll start working on the perimeter fencing, which really is a big part of being able to sleep at night, and have peaceful relations with the neighbors.