Stop Deer With Two Short Fences Instead of One Tall One

The Problem

A deer clears a six-foot fence without breaking stride, so protecting a garden the brute-force way means eight feet of fencing — expensive, ugly, and a permitting headache in plenty of places. Meanwhile the orchard keeps getting eaten.

The Technique

Fence the deer's eyes instead of its legs.

1. Build a fence just 4 feet tall around the garden.
2. Build a second 4-foot fence, parallel to the first, 4 feet outside it.

That's the whole system — an old-school, hand-built double fence. It works because of two facts about deer:

• They can jump high, or far, but not both at the same time. Clearing the first fence would land them inside a 4-foot corridor with no room to gather another jump.
• Their depth perception is terrible — for a human it would be like judging the gap with one eye covered. Two fence lines close together read as one deep, unjudgeable obstacle, and deer don't attempt jumps they can't judge.