A Tale Of Barbed Wire

Barbed wire has always been a rather controversial type of fencing in the west, but it does work well and keeps the cattle in. Properly maintained, it is inexpensive and not terribly offensive to the eye. Old rusty barbed wire is even a popular item for rustic style decor and I'm even guilty of keeping some around for using in my artistic endeavors.
However, there is another side of barbed wire that makes one wonder if it really does have a life of its own. I have several frayed and torn items of clothing from trying to slip between the wires into the neighbors pasture on my walking expeditions. I recently had to crawl completely out of my sweatshirt to get extricated from a particularly vicious barb that caught my back and just wouldn't let go no matter which way I moved. I'm sure my dog thought I was nuts, since she just slips under the bottom strand and keeps going. As a matter of fact, she thinks barbed wire is much, much better than the electric fence (that's another story altogether!).
Last week I found another reason to dislike barbed wire. We were burning off my brother-in-law's pasture and it got to be well after dark. My sister-in-law and I were in my husband's pickup and we wanted to get back out on the road without having to drive all the way around their pasture, so sis says to just go thru the open gate into the neighbor's pasture and follow the fence down to their gate onto the road. Seemed like a nice simple plan and she assured me that they had gone through there earlier and I just had to go around one little brush pile and we'd be fine. Well, we hadn't gone 20 yards before I heard this nasty scratching, dragging sound and right after that the truck stopped and wouldn't go any further. Thinking I had picked up a branch or something I put it in reverse and tried to back up - no luck. Sis looks out her door and says "Uh-oh, we've pick up some barbed wire". "Some" was putting it mildly. Apparently the neighbor had replaced a large area of fence and left the old stuff in a tangled pile waiting for me to come along and "pick up". We tried pulling it free, but there were so many strand's going around the tire, it looked like motorcyle spokes. Nothing else to do but call our husbands who were on the other side of the pasture to come a rescue us with some wire cutters. Turns out wire cutters were no match for that mess, they had to go get a portable torch and crawl under the pick up and cut about 20 strands that were wrapped around the axle also. It was nearly midnight, flashlight batteries were growing dim, and it was starting to rain when we finally got all the barbed wire cut out of the truck and safely removed from causing any other harm. I was all set for a nice lecture on the way home, but my sweetie just told me it could happen to anybody.
All I know is: 1) don't drive around in other people's pastures after dark, and 2) don't ever follow directions from my sister-in-law! Oh, and I NEVER leave any barbed wire laying around for some unsuspecting person or animal to get tangled up in!