It’s been ages since I last wrote here, and as usual it’s not because there’s nothing going on; just nothing notable enough to write about.
I was prompted to write about an odd occurrence one of our neighbors recently had.
Living somewhat out in the boonies here we’d like to think we’re isolated from some of the weird things that happen involving people, simply because there are fewer of them out here spread further apart.
When our horses were shot a few years ago by an autistic neighbor boy whose dad thought a .22 caliber rifle was a good toy to give him, it was a realization that shocking or unimaginable things can happen to anyone, regardless of where they live. But even that seemed like a once in a million occurrence.
Then this last week there was another incident involving one of our (few) neighbors that seemed too bizarre to have really happened.
This neighbor is an animal lover like Kim. She too has her own menagerie of animals, and Kim pays her to help do barn chores at our place occasionally. (I think Kim first got to know her when she showed up to help after our horses were shot.)
A week ago she called Kim to tell her one of her dogs that was kenneled outside was missing, asking if we had seen the dog. She was quite upset, but for some reason she had a theory was that someone had stolen the dog.
It seemed like an absurd theory to me – after all who would steal a dog from someone out in the middle of nowhere? I believed it was more likely that the dog had somehow simply escaped and run off.
She reported the dog lost to local animal control and asked us to check our security cameras to see if he dog had run by our house.
However, as it turns out, she called a few days later to tell Kim that her dog had been found. Apparently there was a runaway teenage girl (with some mental health issues) who had been living in a nearby cornfield and police found her with the dog. She claimed it was hers and had even tried to cover up a spot on the dog’s chest to disguise it.
The girl had been burglarizing homes in the area as well so police were already on the case.
It was another disturbing incident that happened too close to our home, making us realize (again) that we’re not isolated from the bad things that people do, even out here in the boonies.
We’ve had our fair share of critters invading the barn over the years (they like the food we leave out for our barn cats), and years ago in a short period I trapped and released over a half dozen raccoons and a couple of opossum that were living in and/or eating the cat food in the barn. You can see a video of that endeavor here.
While doing chores later at night a few weeks ago, Kim captured a grainy photo of a critter in the barn with her cell phone that I initially took to be a rat but then realized was a skunk.
About the only critters that don’t get any breaks around our place (other than rodents) are skunks because there is no safe way to live trap and release them without getting sprayed, although Kim has experimented with doing that with varying degrees of success.
So she set the live trap with the intention of catching the skunk, but a couple days later found a critter inside that she couldn’t (or subliminally didn’t want to) identify. It was a rat.
Since he had already been live trapped that rat was lucky enough to be relocated (to probably infest someone else’s farm). But days after that in the process of moving some chicken nesting boxes she found rats had overrun the barn, and we’re now trying to determine how to eradicate them.
We need a method that won’t put our animals at risk (including chickens and cats) so we’ve eliminated poison bait as an option. I found some videos of hunters that kill vermin on farms using pellet guns (and night vision scopes). Although using that method might be an amusing endeavor I have neither the time nor inclination to stake out the barn with a pellet gun (although it’s a job I’m sure nephew Justin would enjoy!).
The method I think best suits our purposes is an electric rap zapper, as long as the entrance is small enough to prevent our other animals from entering.
My soldering video finally broke the 1,000,000 views mark towards the end of last month. Do a search for “soldering” on YouTube and it comes up first on the list! For years the now second most popular video on YouTube had been ahead of mine in views, but this year mine jumped ahead and has stayed ahead since then.