When we bought our house in 1998, our back yard came with what I would call an old metal dog fence; a sturdy, unsightly, somewhat rusted, waist-high construct of woven wire rectangles stretched between metal posts. Our yard is large and the fence ran down both sides and across the back. It was overgrown with ivy and weeds and leaned dramatically in places. The metal posts were topped by metal ball and sunk in concrete at the bottom.