A few days ago, I lost one of my Rouen ducks to the bane of poultry keepers-predators. By the leavings of the kill, I surmised it was most likely raccoon, but possibly opossum. I set traps,but nothing returned, most likely due to an ice storm. The next evening , I went into the barn and ran into a large male opossum on the top of a twenty foot stack of first cut hay. He was an easy shot with the gun I was wearing, but the idea of a 9mm sized hole in the roof of my barn was not very appealing. I went to the house for a .22 rifle but could not find an angle to make a safe shot. I let our old blue heeler, Nipper, through the sheep pens and she climbed the stack and caught the intruder in short order.
Nipper is an excellent huntress of groundhogs and other small mammals, but a bit feral. She rightly assumes anything she catches belongs to her. She also hunts for both sport and food. While she will share her kills with me, if I set it back down she regards it as dinner. Normally, I take her kills back when I find them, because her culinary habits are disgusting. However, this one she got to keep. After all, it is Christmas.
2 comments:
Any worries that she'll run deer?
Hi Robert,
When she was younger that was an issue, but she usually did not chase them more than a few yards.
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