4,000 Volts is Pretty Good

I've been messing with electric fence alot lately. In fact, last Saturday, I prolly got shocked like 100 times. Sterling and Ginger each learned about electric fence too (not too many tears, but they were there for sure.) I am using the old charger and portions of the fence that the previous owners left here. It seems to work OK, and seeing as it powers a fairly large area, I figured it was not too bad. The problem is that whenever it gets shorted out, I get to thinking that it is just because it is such an old charger. In fact, the other day, I couldn't get it to work at all. I decided to go down to the farm store and buy a new one. $210 later and I had a good one that would be a solid investment for years to come. Of course, then I got home and the old one was working again :( ????
So we kept the old charger and the new one has been sitting in the box until today. Today, the fence was not working (again) so I monkeyed around until I was fed up and opened the new charger and plugged it in. Well, it must be putting out more voltage because I could hear the short - that's right, hear it. The voltage was high enough that I could hear the arc as the electricity jumped through the wires I had draped over a fence onto the elec. wire (creating a short.) I fixed that and then the craziest thing happened. I could hear another short....this time, coming from the ground near the shop! The sound was coming from about 3' away from where the charger line goes under ground to get out to the livestock area. I got out a shovel and quickly found that the problem was that they had used a wirenut with no weather protection to make a connection and then buried it. Apparently, the old charger didn't have enough juice to jump that gap enough to make enough noise for it to be heard, but the new one did. Long story short, I got that fixed too.
Later, I was watering the garden when I got a real wakeup call. I accidentally backed up into a fence while I was pulling on a garden hose and that fence has an electric wire around the top to keep the horses from leaning on it. The contact occurred right on my right shoulderblade and it literally dropped me to my knees and made me involuntarily scream. Holy monkey snot! I mean that thing dropped me like a sack of potatoes! Recall that I had been shocked prolly a hunert times the week before? Those were NOTHING like this. My legs were tingly for about an hour, my head hurts, and I can still (hours later) feel the spot where my shoulder touched. [I just went and looked in the mirror - there is a welt there.]
The meter shows 4,000 volts, but the old one was registering 3,000 to 3,500, so I am not sure why the difference was so drastic. It was a good thing I was wearing shoes and standing on dry ground because it was hard to breath for a second and if I had been on wet ground or something, that stupid thing might have killed me. I guess I am going to take that thing back to the store because if the kids get hit with it like that (and they would,) that would not be good. I guess now that I have all the shorts discovered, my old one might even be shocking harder too.