The battle

I changed my mind about Jennifer writing this one.  You are stuck with me!

What would drive an otherwise sane person to write this?

THE BATTLE!

So for weeks now both family farms have been battling a predator.  Stealing the cat food, beating up on my barn kitty, and stealing chickens.  It’s a frustrating battle to be involved in!  Try this – didn’t work.  Try that – didn’t work.  So the chicken count dropped significantly and poor barn kitty is looking haggard and skinny.

We have changed the catfood container, moved the extra goat feed, fed the cats less at a time so it wouldn’t be left in the bowl for bait.  Jen and Jeremy have added chicken wire, added some more, tried to put them back in the better protected stall, and tried to move them to an easier to secure building (the precursor to the texts above).  None of these things worked, if they had – we would seem much calmer about the whole situation.

Battles are tiresome in the short term and completely exhausting if they last for very long.  So the battle raged for weeks between farmers and the unknown predator.  Finally the other night, we made some progress!  We caught two raccoons!

We actually had spent some time talking to the kids, making sure they understood that we would likely kill whatever was terrorizing the barns.  Funny, for terrible and ferocious beasts that were keeping us all aggravated for weeks, they were just a bit cute.

Farmer man decided that we would release them far far away from our farm and from other human habitations.  So we packed them up in the car, drove several miles away to an uninhabited area to release them – with all four windows down in the pouring rain because THEY STINK REALLY, REALLY STINK!!!  They are much cuter when they are not biting my cat or eating our chickens and when they are not confined in a car with me!

I can’t get a video to upload on the blog for some reason!

This was the response from Jennifer when we sent her a video of the release:

I wish I would have recorded Jennifer telling the story of the chickens that kept flying out of the electric mesh fence that she was trying to put around the new coop to keep them safe.  They would NOT go in to the safe place, they would NOT stay in the fence.  The very idea of being protected freaked them out completely because the surroundings were unfamiliar.  The smallest breed, Campign? or maybe Campine, was so excited that it used Jennifer’s head as a launching spot to a tree branch where it stayed all night – refusing to come down.

I have often drawn parallels between caring for animals and raising children.  But not only that, between caring for animals and God caring for us.  How often are we the crazy chickens trying to fly out of the protected place that our Farmer/Father/Shepherd has provided . . .

So far at least one night without losing any chickens, we might be winning the battle