yeah, chesterton's fence has fully crossed the line from useful rhetorical tool to frequently mis-applied aphorism. don't remove the fence until you know why i

yeah, chesterton's fence has fully crossed the line from useful rhetorical tool to frequently mis-applied aphorism. don't remove the fence until you know why it was built is a simple, useful thought experiment. but it doesn't mean "don't remove the fence until you know about every single side effect that it could possibly have had since it was built, including things the builder could never have possibly imagined, and fully accounted for the consequences of each of those effects." if you sell the bull in chesterton's field, then you can tear down chesterton's fence. whether or not that lets the coyotes access the neighbour's chickens isn't part of the metaphor.