Fence Tape & Cow Brains

Last week this short, but brilliant post appeared at Exile Lifestyle. I’m thrilled that Colin has allowed me to share it with my readers here. Enjoy!

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 momentum, 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?