Category: castle frostbite.

Our elderly dachshund Guinevere, the matriarch of the clan, has had health problems for the last few years due to the pancreatitis she gave herself by raiding too many garbage cans. In the last few months, her health took a nose dive, and her quality of life deteriorated. She slept most of the day, skipped many of her meals, couldn’t control her hind legs well, had trouble navigating even small stairs, and often seemed confused and dazed. We considered taking her to the vet for that last trip then, but she seemed to bounce back a little. The vet examined her, concluded that she had had some sort of neural event—stroke, maybe—and told us that we were basically down to palliative care for her.

Today was the day we had been dreading for a while. She got up, refused her food, went back to her bed and spent the morning alternating between crying in obvious pain and walking around the house on failing hind legs. It was a heartbreaking sight, and we decided that she had no quality of life left. So I let her take one last nap with me on the bed upstairs while I said good-bye. Then Robin came home from work to put her into the car and take her for that last drive to the vet, to render her dog of almost fifteen years that last service. Guinevere is no longer in pain.

This dog was the most magnificent example of her breed I have ever met. Super-smart, stubborn, combative, yet loving and loyal. She gave birth to seventeen puppies and lived to her last day with three of them, plus one granddog, as the boss of a happy little pack. She raided many trashcans, fought many battles—against other dogs, poultry, small furry critters, and once even a fully-grown raccoon—and never backed down from a fight.

I always said she was too tough and mean to die, but of course I was wrong. The fight against her ailing older body was the one battle she couldn’t win in the end. We will miss her dearly, none more than Robin, who took her home as a little puppy in 1997, and who has been her companion for almost fifteen years. Guinevere vetted me for the position of mate for her human when I met Robin, and she has been a part of my life for ten years, but she was my wife’s dog first and always.

Farewell, Miss Guin, Battle-Bitch, destroyer of trash receptacles, eater of lobster shells, implacable foe of furry wildlife. You’ve had a good and full life, and the house won’t quite be the same without you to guard it.

Surprisingly, raccoons are actually #1 on the list of top chicken predators. They have a lot of dexterity in those front paws, they’re smart enough to figure out barrel bolt locks and other simple locks, and they’re pretty strong for an animal their size.

One of his cousins fell to our dachshunds three years ago. Maybe this one’s a relative looking for compensation for Cousin Bob’s untimely departure. Regardless, our poultry version of Supermax Florence ADX seems to have him stymied.

We bought a weatherproof wildlife camera to record visitors to the chicken coop, just to see what’s out there trying to score a free chicken dinner. I set it up on Sunday and set it so the camera goes off whenever the sensor detects motion. I checked the flash card every day, and usually it only shows us as we let the chickens out in the morning and feed them.

Today I checked it to find our first nocturnal would-be chicken thief:

Mr. Raccoon!

He stuck around for a while and checked the perimeter of the run until about twenty minutes later, when he scampered off without loot:

I can look at the sequence of pictures and see where he tried to dig into the run, but failed because of the two feet of hardware cloth skirted and staked down in front of the run. There’s no damage on the coop or the run anywhere. It appears half-inch hardware cloth is too much to tackle for your garden variety midnight bandit.

Interesting little toy, that wildlife camera. It’s nice to know just what exactly lurks around that chicken coop in the middle of the night.

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.

(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.

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.

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

There’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.

The chickens have a new home, the mighty Cluckheim Keep.

There are some leveling and roof issues to be worked out this weekend, but Cluckheim Keep should be reasonably fortified against predators. They can’t tunnel into it, and those walls are pretty hard to chew through.