JWR,
I particularly enjoyed John L.’s article about predator-proofing property. My family has lived on a 40-acre former farm since 1990, and for quite some time we kept pheasants, chickens, and quail. At times we had nearly 100 birds. To a lesser degree, we did garden as well, though the local whitetail deer tended to make a mess of it. The game birds helped keep the local wild population up and the chickens provided us kids with valuable opportunities to learn how to keep animals for food.
While not living in mountain country, we had our share of predation as well. The chicken wire we had counted on to protect my 25 chicks brand-new from the Murray McMurray hatchery proved no match for a weasel, which slipped in through the openings and killed and hauled off half of them before their first night at the farm was over. We caught him the next night in a rat trap baited with one that he left stuck in the chicken wire. We also had various other predators come by with less success- including opossums, raccoons, and skunks. The foxes and coyotes on our place never bothered with the pens thanks to a vocal beagle and a couple Labrador retrievers nearby. None of the smaller predators ever made it into our well-built and covered aviaries, but they did set the birds into a panic on a regular basis. A couple of these birds flew up into the wire so hard as to kill themselves. After the weasel attack we fitted our brooding pens with tight-weave metal mesh instead of chicken wire, and the birds were kept in these pens until large enough to fly up and away from a weasel or other smaller predator.
As John L. mentioned, by far the most-successful predator on our farm was Dad’s beloved beagle. We went to visit our grandparents one weekend and found him escaped from his kennel upon our return. He had killed all our pheasants and most of our chickens, chewing through the chicken wire to get into the aviaries. The event so traumatized one old hen that we saw her hoofing it across a neighbor’s field, away from the slaughter, never to be seen again. When we tell stories about that beagle, we always remember the great chicken escape along with it.
We learned from our experience and constructed a kennel with a food of buried fence and big, un-digable rocks along the perimeter and a roof that he couldn’t chew or claw through. Our beagle spent the rest of his days looking forward to the winter and chasing rabbits and never again killed another farm bird. Dad still counts him as one of the two best hunting dogs he ever had.
The point to me writing is to say that dogs are, and always will be, predators. These instincts are exactly what makes them valuable to us humans- and building a proper kennel and training them well can save you, your neighbors, and your dogs considerable heartache over the years. Building your animal enclosures to keep the neighbor’s dog away can also save some grief for your animals and neighbors, too.
SurvivalBlog is one of my daily “must-reads”- thanks for all you do. – G.R. in Texas