Author: Marko

castle frostbite. parenting.

science camp week.

004

The new chicken run, completed and populated.

This week is a complete change in pace for us. The kids are attending a science day camp every day until Friday, which means we leave the house early. I get to drop them off and then take a few hours out in Hanover or West Lebanon to sit and scribble for a bit, which means I’m getting five Dadcation days this week. Lyra’s camp is only half-day, so I have to pick her up at lunch, and then we go home and let the dogs out and check on the chickens before going back out and fetching Quinn in the afternoon.

The kids are enjoying their camp. I’m enjoying the time off in the mornings. Lyra is kindergarten age now, and if I had them in public school, I could have a quiet morning every day. But then putting them in school would be more for my convenience than their benefit. I will, however, enroll Quinn in some extracurricular stuff this year. We’re already paying the property taxes that bankroll our local school; might as well start taking advantage of the facilities a bit.

aminals. castle frostbite.

desperate times, desperate measures.

The fox is still out there. The chickens have been cooped up in their house for three days now, and they are getting a little fidgety. This weekend, the temps will hit the 90s again, and then Cluckheim Keep will be too warm during the day. So we had to commission a quick emergency project—a fox-proof 120 square-foot outdoor addition to Cluckheim Keep. Thankfully, our handyman is really good with a table saw.

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(That bottom right shot shows the residents supervising the labor force.)

It’s incomplete, but it will be finished at some point tomorrow. The mesh that encloses the run is 19-gauge galvanized hardware cloth, skirted two feet out from the run and staked down to prevent digging. The corner posts are 4x4s, and the roof is thick plywood that will get a tarpaper cover. It weighs about twice as much as the shed. I don’t see anything short of a bear getting in there, and that bear would have to put some serious shoulder into it to break it. One thing is for certain—the foxes won’t be able to pull off any snatch & run attacks anymore.

The chickens are happier free-ranging, obviously, but they’re not happy at all when they get chewed on by a fox, so this will have to be a compromise. With the extra bill for materials and labor, however, those eggs are going to cost us about ten bucks a piece. On the plus side–if we ever decide to give up on the chicken thing, that run will make  a great little garden house.

aminals. in the news.

fox two aftermath.

I got Chicken #8 back yesterday, but it took me a few hours. She was hiding in the underbrush and wouldn’t come out, fleeing from me whenever I tried to approach her. The other chickens were all safe in Cluckheim Keep.

Foxes are smart animals. They remember the location of an easy buffet like a pasture full of free-ranging chickens. I didn’t want to lose any more of the flock, but I had to get the straggler back. So I let them all out to free-range again and coaxed them over to the location of Trauma Chicken with some treats. Sure enough, the straggler heard the flock and rejoined them in a hurry. Of course, they didn’t want to go back into the chicken house just yet, so I had to spend two hours out in the rain, standing guard over the flock with the shotgun. At nightfall, they all went inside as usual, and I locked the door and went inside to dry off. The things I do for my poultry.

Later, I was poking around on the Backyard Chickens discussion forum for some ideas on fox-safe runs when I came across a story that made me shake my head in disgust.

When you read the “Predators and Pests” forum at Backyard Chickens, you’ll quickly learn that flock wipes are no rarity. Foxes in particular will stash their kills and work in pairs, and a hungry pair of foxes with kits waiting back at the den can take a flock of twenty chickens in minutes. Foxes are pretty much a constant risk to free-range chickens, and they can get into fairly complex enclosures. What was more irritating to read about, however, was the sheer number of incidents people recounted where free-roaming neighbors’ dogs had killed some or all of their chickens. From the accounts, that’s a pretty common event, and a lot of dog owners just plain refuse to take responsibility for their animals or pay restitution. After all, they’re “just chickens”. (Tell that to the little kid who lost all of her pet chickens to a neighbor dog while she had to watch the whole thing.)

Anyway, one of the posts was a link to this article. To recap: young woman in Durango, CO owns a lab/Great Dane mix. She flies home to Michigan for a family visit, but doesn’t want to pay the extra fees to fly her dog too, so she leaves him in the care of a pet sitter. The pet sitter’s roommate lets the dog out without a leash, and the dog runs off the property, which isn’t fenced in. Dog goes to a neighbor’s farm and proceeds to attack and kill the neighbor’s grandkid’s chickens. Family friend who happens to be at the farm shoots the dog dead after trying to scare him off by yelling doesn’t work.

Dog owner is shocked and amazed to find out that shooting a dog molesting livestock is perfectly legal. Read through the Comments thread on that article for the stereotypical granola soundbites of “needless killing”, “armed rednecks who feel the need to carry a gun around in January”, “shoulda fired a warning shot”, and so on. Now she made a Facebook group trying to get enough signatures to change or amend the law to “give more rights to dogs and their owners.”

*blink*

Don’t get me wrong, I love dogs. We own five of the little stinkers. But I know that we are fiscally and legally responsible for everything they do. If I let them escape out of neglect or inattention, and they run to a neighbor’s property and start killing chickens, I would not fault the neighbor for shooting my dogs. The buck stops with the dog’s owner, and nobody else.

What the hell else is the owner of the chickens supposed to do? You have a large dog (a lab/Great Dane mix is a big animal), engaged in killing your livestock, and not obeying shouted commands to stop. Should you try to physically restrain the animal—which is already in “kill” mode—and risk getting mauled? Should you let him kill all the chickens and then hope you can locate the owner of that dog to ask for restitution? Should you wait for animal control to show up, when a dog can kill an entire flock of 20 or 30 chickens in less time than it takes for you to make the call?

I just can’t fathom the level of self-absorption and blame-shifting that would lead someone to blame the farmer who was forced to deal with the situation.

(I know that dogs are family members to most people, and that losing one hurts a lot. And yes, chickens are cheap. But tell someone who has raised a twenty-chicken flock from the “little yellow fuzzball” stage and watered, fed, and kept them safe every day for months or years only to see them all killed in two minutes for sport by an unleashed dog that they’re only worth the $2.50 a pop you paid for the chicks.)

aminals. castle frostbite.

fox two.

Another fox grabbed a chicken on the front lawn just a little while ago. I ran out, and he let go of the chicken and ran off. This time, I didn’t have a good shot, and he was running toward the public road anyway.

Two hours of patrolling and coaxing later, I have seven chickens in the chicken house, and one very traumatized chicken in the underbrush behind it. She lost a bunch of feathers and won’t let me come near her. I’ll have to see if she collects herself enough to com back to the coop. One of the araucanas is missing. That puts us at eight, seven if the injured araucana doesn’t gather herself enough to let me coop her up before nightfall.

Yeah, they’re wild animals, doing what predators do, but right now I am not feeling charitable toward foxes. I put a lot of work into those chickens.

I’ll have to go to Home Despot and buy some lumber and chicken wire for a large chicken run. It seems we have a few too many predators running around here to make free-ranging chickens a wise proposition.

this monkey house.

the downsides of green policies.

The German magazine Der Spiegel has a great article on the unintended consequences of Germany’s strict environmental regulations and their effects on everyday life.

This plays into what I mentioned in an earlier blog post: that to a lot of policymakers and voters, negative results of a policy are almost entirely irrelevant as long as the intent is proper. (The corollary is that a positive result of a policy is also irrelevant if the intent wasn’t proper.) In the end, then, it’s not about helping the ecosystem, it’s about the practitioners feeling as though they are.

aminals. castle frostbite.

dachshunds with disabilities.

After a few nighttime incidents with Elderly Dog, the Castle now sports a handful of handicapped access ramps for geriatric dachshunds:

IMG_0678IMG_0677IMG_0681There’s another contraption on the dog door that leads into the garage. It’s a nifty ramp that can be raised and lowered from the inside of the house. That makes four special handicapped access ramps in the house for the benefit of Elderly Dog, who can no longer hop over the ledges by herself.

When you have five dogs, we don’t really have a month that passes without some sort of dog-related expense. There are vaccination boosters, small and moderate injuries, regular check-ups, emergency visits…all I know is that if I had all the money we’ve spent on vet bills in a pile on my kitchen table, we could easily buy a new and not-too-shabby car and then use the rest of the cash to all go to Germany on vacation for a month. But you do what you have to do to keep your Animal-American Non-Human Companions safe and comfy.

capitalism.

the holy grail of joysticks.

This flight sim setup is sick and excessive and way too expensive for a peripheral, and I want one. Oh, yes, I do.

I don’t have the optimism to “add to wish list” or “save it for later”. My entire PC before the add-on video card and the beefier power supply cost only very slightly more than that HOTAS setup. I could—and would—buy a bunch of other shiny things before I could see myself dropping almost half a grand on a joystick. But yeah, that’s pretty swank right there. The only way you can get more control realism is if you break into an Air Force base and steal a stick and throttle setup out of an actual A-10.

in the news. masters and servants.

most transparent administration evar.

So the White House is asserting “executive privilege” on the release of the Fast & Furious documents to the House committee.

What the hell is “executive privilege”? Does it have something to do with the restroom use at the White House, or maybe toll-free calls from the phone in the Oval Office. I don’t rightly know, because my copy of the Constitution says precisely fuck-all about “executive privilege”.

You know, that’s part of the reason why we’re a Constitutional republic—so the #1 public employee can’t assert special rights. You let them claim “executive privilege” when it comes to testimony in Congressional committees, and sooner or later you’ll end up with a Chief Executive who dresses in fantasy uniforms and renames the days of the week after maternal ancestors or favorite race horses.

bullets & links.

bullets & links.

  • Gogol Bordello. Holy shit, why haven’t I heard of these guys before? It’s exactly what it says on the tin—gypsy punk—and for some reason I can’t stop listening to it. Robin hates the one song she has heard so far, but you know what they say about taste. Let’s just say that the Vanilla Ice “To The Extreme” CD that I found in our combined CD collections after we got married wasn’t mine.
  • Readercon. I’ll be there for most of the weekend, from Friday afternoon to Sunday noon-ish. Most of the Viable Paradise crew from last year will be there again, and I’ll get to meet a few new VPers I’ve only met on the Intertwitters so far. This is my one big con event for the year—I go to Boskone as well, but only for the day on Saturday—so I’m looking forward to talking shop and destroying ethanol with some of my favorite unsavory writer types again.
  • A Swedish zookeeper was eaten by wolves. She was delicious.
  • I finally finished watching all the Avengers precursor movies. The last one on the list was 2008’s Hulk. All of them were perfectly serviceable and entertaining, but if I had to put them in a ranking, it would go Iron Man > Thor > Iron Man 2 > Captain America > Hulk. It seems we needed to get to 2012 until a SFX crew managed a CGI Hulk that doesn’t look like he was Rotoscoped out of  a mediocre video game.
  • Chicken count: still 9. They needed a bit of coaxing to accept their new digs. The first night, I had to get their little wooden coop out and move it to its original location, at which point they all breathed a collective “Thank fuck” and filed in to roost for the night. Then I had to carry the coop back into Cluckheim Keep, chickens and all. The second evening, we had to corral them and herd the flock into the Keep. The third evening, I just had to kind of walk them in, no coaxing required. Now they actually use the roosting spots in the Keep to hang out during the day, so they must be taking to it.
  • Friend Mark pointed me to a website that sells repackaged old DOS games, rigged with DOSbox to be playable on modern Windows XP/Vista/7 boxes. (All the games are licensed from their original copyright holders.) Just for nostalgia, I bought a copy of Wing Commander III for $5.99. If you young whippersnappers want to check out what kind of games we old geezers played on our 50-megahertz 486s with 8MB of RAM, there are some fine classic examples of 1990s PC gaming on there for a song and a dance. The graphics are way dated now, of course, but the games are still fun, and surprisingly complex for programs that had to fit into 1/1000th the memory you carry around in your cell phone today.

Thus endeth today’s linkapalooza. Now I have to make some lunch to feed the beasts, and the chickens, too.