That's what I like to hear. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
Should taste like chicken if they fatten'd up on your chicken feed [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
That's what I like to hear. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
Should taste like chicken if they fatten'd up on your chicken feed [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
This morning I noticed the chicken feeder knocked over again ( it is one of the big ones that can hold 22 pounds, white and red plastic round shaped ones ) so....I guess I have another racoon or two that haven't gotten the hint yet.
I am glad my neighbors are country folks that don't mind me shooting at 1 am...haha.
Shooting is not the first choice of an environmentally sensitive person when there are acceptable alternatives. In five years I have relocated a throng of racoons, a few o'possum, and several beaver. The beaver however were dead when relocated. Collateral damage so far has been two turtles and three armadillos that got caught in beaver traps.
It isn't that I don't have the ability, or equipment to shoot critters (22-250 will handle most bothersome critters out to 300 yds) and I have Ruger semi-auto pistols and rifles with interchangeable muzzle appliance that reduces sound signature to the click of the firing pin falliing so noise isn't an issue.
My personal policy is live trap and relocate across a fair sized river in a good habitat. NONE have returned. I do take pix and they are differentiable (although not smoothly continuous... sorry... a math joke)
If I suspected the same animals have returned then they will have a hunting accident. Second strike would be the death penalty. I'm not overly soft hearted, just not particularly blood thirsty and have no need to try to get an ego boost out of shooting some dumb animal doing what a jillion years of survival has taught it to do. My lazyness or lack of forethought in handling feed so that it is easy pickings for critters makes me at fault not the oportunistic feeding habits of wild creatures. I refuse to "externalize" my shortcominigs by blaming the critter for my lack of understanding about the way things work. I might as well blame Sir Isac Newton for gravity when I drop something on my toe when it was really my fault for doing something dumb.
Basically if I don't need it for food and it can reasonably be controlled or tollerated without having to kill it, then why kill it? Is this what makes us human, we kill because we can not because we really need to? I look for alternatives before I look for my gun. That said, as I write this my silenced Ruger 10-22 (loaded with subsonic hollow points is within easy reach) Pets and dumped pets have been menacing stock and this gets instant first offence death penalty with no reconsideration.
If I was overrun with critters that were causing considerable economic loss or constituted a clear and present danger to our safety and couldn't find an acceptable non-lethal means to cope (I can't imagine that and I have quite an imagination) then I'd trap, poison, shoot, or whatever to remedy the situation but it sure wouldn't be the first or second option tried.
One of the things that makes being in the country a distinctly different experience from the city is C R I T T E R S.
//soapbox mode = off//
[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
Pat, you raise lots of conversational points.
I believe I am "environmentally" aware, as in I don't dump my used motor oil on the driveway or dig a hole and bury toxic waste.
I don't think relocating these racoons I am dealing with is the right answer either, they very likely would just become someone elses problem.
I assume the area you move your raccons to is uninhabited by racoons or people?
I'm not blood thirsty, I don't get an ego boost out of killing them, I don't see it as a challenge and I don't enjoy it. It is something that needs to be done, so I do it.
Like I mentioned before, I didn't have a problem with them eating the chicken feed, when they started eating the chickens, they became a problem and had to go.
Anyhow, I am not going to answer your point for point, I started to but I don't have the desire to turn this into a debate I guess. Some of your comments and generalizations regarding ego, lazyness, implied "externalizing" of shortcomings I find pretty offensive, I used to enjoy your posts.
To each his own.
TWSTANLEY, Sorry if you were offended as that was not my intent. I think there are usually alternatives available if we take the effort to look for them. The area I relocated the animals to is even less populated than where I am. I wouldn't "DUMP" them on someone else. I had no concern for whether or not the target dump zone had pre-existing wildlife of the same or different species.
I find that when I am willing to put out the effort I usually find better alternatives. If there were no better alternatives and the problem was severe enough I would not avoid shooting the pests.
I don't know your situation or inclination. I know that at some point if the difficulty of an alternative solultion escolated beyond my appraisal of what is reasonable I would resort to deadly force. This is an argument of the beard.
This is all shades of grey like the "argument of the beard." If I had one long hair on my chin is it a beard? Most would say no. How about 2, 3 or x? At some point most would agree that it was a beard. We all have different thresholds of tollerance and lengths to which we are willing to go to avoid killing animals who are just doing what their nature directs. That threshold is reasonably different for poisonous snakes or mountain lions in your yard than for o'possums or racoons.
I think it is a reasonable position to take that different levels of threat be met with different responses. I would never fault anyone for escolalting to lethal force if they had made a legitimate effort to solve the problem by less drastic measures first.
Lots of folks have the same response for any incursion into "THEIR" space by any critter, shoot it. I don't think that is a very enlightened approach.
Again, sorry if you were offended. I think you may be reading more into my comments, taking things too personally that were not directed to you personally, than intended. I try to communicate precisely but often fail.
[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
TW, I agree with you
I let the coon population have its way for many years, and didn't have any feed (chicken, dog, or otherwise) out for them to be attracted to for food.
After 30 years, the population of coon just seemed to be getting out of hand. They decided my wood pile (about 16 cords of oak stacked in my pole shed) was a 'dumping' ground for their apparent satisfaction. The coon scat became about 4" deep on top of the wood. I tried several things, some of which worked and most didnt'. The spray of bleach worked the best, but only for a month or so. The stink on the wood was bad enough, but the concern I had for the disease that coon carry in their scat (don't recall the name, but it is pretty severe on children, and can be pretty debilitating for adults) was what caused me to start trapping. Also, the bird population is reduced by the coons eating their eggs and young out of the nest. Only thing I can think of that raided my bluebird nests year after year until I put the nesting box on a 1" steel pole that the coons can't climb.
Once set up for trapping, I couldn't believe the number of racoon that I caught the first year (36) and the next year (34). I was getting no thrill out of either the trapping or the shooting. A local trapper was getting the hides (he also showed me how to be better at trapping too). The third year I only caught a few, which may have been me tired of the chore, but I also had the feeling there were fewer coon around (duh).
Then a couple years, I didn't trap and the problem started again (I think the smell of previous coon scat attracts more, and there is some ceremonial feature in their social makeup) in my wood pile. So last year, out came the trap.
This year, with the coon sign around and the several that I often see running across the drive at night, I think I still have many coon around. Could be others in town are dumping them here.
On a parallel note, I learned last year the next door farm was a dumping ground for about 50 grey squirrels caught last year in a campaign by two guys in a small village about 4 miles from here, and one slipped up when he told about dumping them on '****'s' farm. I was shooting grey squirrels because there were so many.
The reason being, about 8 years ago, I had many grey squirrels around the house, and kept seeing a sick one. I thought it was the same sick one, but later realized a sickness was going through the population and they were dying off one by one (maybe more). I started finding the dead bodies, and they apparently froze, or something, after losing all their hair. (I later wished I had shot some of them and put them out of their misery). I let the coyotes clean up the grey squirrels shot last year (I don't shoot the bigger fox squirrels), and they must have been pretty efficient, as only a bit of hair was found the next day. Coyotes are around, but they don't bother me so I don't bother them.
Pat, not to worry. I think I was just in my normal "Monday morning everone is out to get me" paranoia.
Hopefully the racoons around here have gotten the message to look but not touch the chickens but have a snack of the feed if they wish. I do enjoy the wildlife we have out in the country and certainly don't wish to kill it off.
twstanley, Oh, you must be in the workforce and not amoung us retarded (retired?) Actualy if you lined up 10 'coons and shot every other one, the rest would probably be back to about the way they were within a day and do what 'coons mostly do... look for food. On the other hand if you used a fence charger to booby trap the object of their attention they would learn to avoid it quite quickly.
A neighbor just bought two young black angus bulls at auction. He decided to put a hot wire inside the fence of their pens so they wouldn't walk through the fence to get to "the girls." He always marks the hot wire with white rag flags. In short order neither bull will get anywhere near a scrap of white cloth. You can fend them off with a hankie! Even funnier is how they apparrently thought the first few shocks were biting flies and tried to swat them with their tails with some obvious and humorous results!
Criters are well programmed for survival, find food, find a mate, avoid many "natural" dangers. They are relatively adaptable but are real short on logic, extrapolation, and such. Shooting a few as an example is not particularly effective on the remaining population.
Around here it seems that everyone wants to shoot all the turtles in all the ponds so they don't eat ALL THE FISH. One of the most prevalent species is the red ear turtle which when grown is 100% vegetarian.
[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
Yep, still working here. My only chance of retiring in the next couple of decades is if I get lucky in the lottery.
I agree on the shooting of every other coon in that the rest would be doing what they normally do pretty quickly. I have no illusions that I am teaching them anything. But if I did shoot every other one, at least there would only be half the original number trying to eat my chickens. [img]/forums/images/icons/cool.gif[/img]
We bought a couple bred Dexter cows last year, and they had their calves last fall. Of course we then needed to get them bred again, so I bought a Dexter bull....we brought the bull home and he pretty soon started showing us how he could crawl thru high tension fences ( well sort of not so high tension obviously ) to get the grass on the other side.
We hooked up our fence charger ( luckily we put the fences up with the plan of making them hot when we needed to ) and spent a weekend on a joint project with the neighbors reworking the 1/4 mile of fence between us and them to get it hot again.
Right after we got the joint fence hot again my wife and I stood with the neighbors watching our bull approach the fence, stick his nose out and sniff at it a bit. I am not sure if he got a tingle from it on his nose, or could just smell the difference now that the fence was hot, but he didn't jump away or anything. He also never crawled thru any more fences, haha. I have heard that horses can smell the difference in a hot wire vs a non hot one, but I also wonder if maybe they are testing it with hairs or something to see if they get a tingle.
The green grass on the other side will be a minor problem when the hormones kick in.
Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
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