ROUGH DAYS ON THE HOMESTEAD - BUT WE ARE MAKING THE BEST OF IT

When wild animals attack your livestock, it can be hard.

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Often, it can be difficult to even know what kind of animal is attacking your flocks or herds. However, this is just what happens in the world. Frequently, wild predators will find your farm animals to be an easy prey, which is part of the reason that proper housing and fencing is important. However, it is often not reasonable or even nice to "keep your livestock locked up" in a cage all day...

DEATH FROM ABOVE

What do you do when you come out to check on your flock and it looks like one of your chickens or roosters exploded? Here, a treasured homestead animal has been found "killed to death," and to make things even worse, the children are there...

The list of potential predators is rather large, even around here. Raccoons, Opossums, Coyotes, Owls, Hawks, Wild Dogs, Domesticated Dogs, and a few others could potentially all be the cause. In this case, though, we knew right away, because a neighbor caught the predator in the act.

The first to go was our last little chick, then this rooster above, and finally, one of our Guinea Fowl. When a neighbor was passing by, she saw a hawk feasting upon the dead body of the little chicken. While she did her best to try to help, the chick was already dead, so the hawk just left the dead body and flew away.

MAKING THE BEST OF IT

The corpse was of the last chick that we hatched out. My @little-peppers named it "Peeps," and it was a hard loss for us. The cutest, littlest one was the first to go, and only the head was gone. The rest of the body was just left behind... and almost wasted.

We decided to bait a live trap with the rest of the carcass. We had not promise of catching anything, but at least live traps allow us to safely relocate the animals rather than killing them even before we get there. Of course the hopes of catching the hawk responsible was basically nonexistent, but we still had the potential to attempt to capture any other predators in the area before they had a chance to attack our flocks.

Sure enough, we didn't capture a hawk, but we did capture a potential threat, an opossum! Not only was it just momentarily detained in the live trap, it also got a free meal, since it ate the rest of the small body left behind by the hawk. Ultimately, this was good, since the dead chicken did not go to waste.

As painful as it may be to have these creatures attack your flocks at night, to catch one before they attack is a happy experience. Just like all other animals, these Opossums have their place in the environment, ecosystem, and world too. When possible, finding a "new home" in the wild, just a little further away from you animals, can be the best solution.

We would rather catch these guys ahead of time rather than giving them a chance to sink their teeth into our live animals. While losing the chicken, rooster, and guinea fowl was not a pleasant experience, we can breed more, and at least it gave us a chance to prevent some further deaths. We still have to keep an eye out for the hawks, and haven't lost any more lately.

As always, I'm @papa-pepper and here's the proof:

proof-of-trying-to-make-the-best-of-it

Until next time…

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GIF provided by @orelmely

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