Shedding some light on the 'fence of death'

ODT Online readers have shed some light on the origins of a slighly macabre find in Central Otago yesterday.

Photographer Stephen Jaquiery came across a fence hung with more than 100 pigskins of varying ages on Middlemarch-Macraes Road.

Readers contacting ODT Online said the fence had been there for years.

Kendall Maker remembered the fence from his childhood about 20 years ago.

“I remember going past this when I was 4-5 years old on our way home to Middlemarch. Me and my older sister called it the pig fence,” he said.

“There was always a new one or two [skins] every week.”

Christine Moodie said it was common courtesy to leave the pelts of wild animals on a farmer’s fence after hunting on their land.

“In the old days the pelts were worth more than the meat,” she said.

The fence’s fame has reached foreign shores, too.

Former Dunedin academic Dr Jonathan Marshall wrote that he investigated the fence with Dunedin artist Justin Spiers in a collaborative photomedia exhibition held in Perth called “Meat Fence”.