Caged

In the United Kingdom, the firm of Barnard, Bishop & Barnard was established in Norwich to produce chain-link fencing by machine in 1844 based on cloth weaving machines (up until that time Norwich had a long history of cloth manufacture).

The Anchor Post Fence Co., established in 1891, bought the rights to the wire-weaving machine and was the first company to manufacture chain-link fencing in the United States. Anchor Fence also holds the first United States patent for chain-link.

The manufacturing of chain-link fencing is called weaving. A metal wire, often galvanized to reduce corrosion, is pulled along a rotating long and flat blade, thus creating a somewhat flattened spiral. The spiral continues to rotate past the blade and winds its way through the previous spiral that is already part of the fence. When the spiral reaches the far end of the fence, the spiral is cut near the blade. Next, the spiral is pressed flat and the entire fence is moved up, ready for the next cycle. The end of every second spiral overlaps the end of every first spiral. The machine clamps both ends and gives them a few twists. This makes the links permanent.

An improved version of the weaving machine winds two wires around the blade at once, thus creating a double helix. One of the spirals is woven through the last spiral that is already part of the fence. This improvement allows the process to advance twice as fast.

These easy to install separators were useful as baseball backstops and to keep the kids in the playground from wandering off. Even my next-door neighbor who had a dispute over property lines had an 8’ installed. They are inexpensive and work well for pet enclosures but now seem proper for incarceration. Got to keep the wrong doers behind chicken wire.

Fully understand the need for fencing to keep livestock from wandering off but the other side of fencing is to keep others out.

I like the ‘free-range’ idea and tried to offer that to all my critters within the boundaries of the house. Today the critters range has grown but they don’t sleep with me now.

Yet I wonder with all this discussion of if this is summer camp or gitmo and no discussion to what might be happening to the female gender, who is paying for all this fencing?

The clothing, food, transportation, doctors, cooks, guards, drivers, lawyers, interpreters, and all the others who need to be housed and fed and clothed, are they behind chain-link fencing? Are they encaged too?

Talking heads will blather on the issue and the populous will comment from every possible direction and tomorrow another fence will go up to surround someone else in our new public housing.

Perhaps these are becoming the new zoos? Who makes chain-link fencing anyway? Will there be a tariff on them?