I feel your pain.If'n Rick and I had to do it all over again...fence our five acres...we'd have stepped up and jest done chainlink (with perhaps razor wire topped and ele hot wire too to stop the clingy climbers)--do it ONCE, get her done up right, not three times getting smarter each round. Expensive...in which aspect? How expensive is it when you put up one page wire and then do another page wire and then do it a third time because your Cattle Dogs are teased by the Minister's son on a bike? Yeh, we had the Minister come by SEVEN YEARS later to apologize and acknowledge that HIS SON was tormenting our dogs and our complaints to HIM were valid!
But if it was not his kid, it would have been any innumerable other people...so we stepped up and took care of our concerns by triple fencing OUR place to keep our stuff IN and other people's stuff OUT! It does not matter when you are standing over a mutilated carcass "who's fault it was!" Tis dead...dead is dead is dead and the heart ache never ends when you let that keep happening, the slashing of your heart's care...money does not bring life back that died in the ultimate of horrors. Paying with money does not change that you had to witness and feel the agony from the loss. Pay up front NOW and avoid the heart ache is what we say. I cannot deal with the bads, so we step up and deal with the issue and hopefully never EVER know what we avoided by trying the best we are able.
When one of our barns burned to ashes (heated bucket used to water a quarantined new ram caused the fire--you can never be too careful with those dang things!) and the police swung by to inspect what happened (neighbour's called the fire department...too late, was already gone--Rick had to relight it to get rid of the reminants...should jest let her go till there was no more fuel left), the officer was freaked right out...over how well fenced our place is. He burst out asking, "Expecting a siege?" Yup over the top and over board all the way, eh...but never any worries, no predation by wandering at large "pets" or wild type predators (too much work--far easier to hit the neighbours than our place), no two legged stealers because we padlock our buildings, we have security cameras and have for years now...bad persons SEE the cameras and that deters many of them from the get go, people that are innocent, never do notice things like that. I wouldn't until Rick showed me what was needed.
We listened to the coyotes howl in the Millennium and enjoyed the show for all its magical meaning; not worried it meant one of the ruminants was being chawed upon.
You do as you so see fit but the best fence you can afford is the best DEFENSE if you have plants you do not want trodden or grazed upon...you have precious creatures you do not want mauled or harvested before their time or worse yet stole by people. YOU have to have decent barriers & deterrents to protect what is near and dear to your heart. I ever so much tire of people whining about how the neighbour's nutso dog ran loose and caused mayhem at their place. In the ultimate end, it is YOUR responsibility alone to step up and protect what you own. How many times ours has save our butts, I don't need to know past it has and it still is--if it don't, watch us up the anti and work at it some more. I sleep well at night, because I am not on pins and needles wondering WHEN (not if) the night crawlers are killing/maiming our possessions. :/
Any fence that is climbable, it still warrants that you have to put the dear creatures safely away in the eve...given flying predators harvest at night and day, the best prevention is a metal roof which also blesses you with weather protection where you don't have your chooks butt deep in filthy soggy muck. Your best wire choice is hardware cloth unless it gets constantly wet and then the coating can poison your critters. We would use something like puckboard in a constantly wet environment...that or tenplast which can get wet and not leach toxins.
Nothing is 100% so if you have something near and dear that you cannot afford to lose, it then lives a more protected and less freedomish life. The Duece Coop contains our breeders...when they retire, we can afford to be more lax and they retire to the Coop fur Sure and run wild when the weather and seasons allow. Better and happier life we figure but we cannot risk some of our stocks and take adequate measures to ensure we get more from them that can continue and let them then go and have the good life...
Zero predation since Earth Day 2007 (left a yard hen out and an owl harvested her...my bad for getting complacent about head counts); I need say no mores on this then.
Do as you are gonna do, but not having to run outside half dressed for going to work because I hear SCREAMS of "ALERT ALERT...Come help us!"...that avoidance in our books is PRICELESS! We don't do this to save money, it is a style of life with the living that makes or breaks it for us. Best you are able or you pay in so many other ways...tears, sorrow, agony, anger over the horror.
Doggone & Chicken UP!
Tara Lee Higgins
Higgins Rat Ranch Conservation Farm, Alberta, Canada
Tara, I certainly enjoyed the tour! I have a "half mutt-half pure" Australian Cattle dog, he's eleven, and smarter than some humans here.
I feel your pain about people teasing your dogs at the fence. I've had it happen too with a different dog. .
Oh, and when I added up all of your fencing costs, I figure it is about what I paid for my house.
There are a bazillion head of waterfowl inside this duck barn...and all summer long they waddle abouts plaguing this lawn with their plops...how do you keep it so green? By diligently hosing it down for half an hour each evening...eliminating the smothering of the good grass. How many gonna step up and do that? Not many, so many and almost all say that ducks are messy. Nope, nada...ducks are not messy...it is how they are kept and how you deal with the potential to foul (fowl?) their environment; never too much water, rest the land, never subject the land to abusive beasts...the secret to successful co-habitation is to manage your land before you manage your livestocks; waterfowl kept on river sand, topped with oat straw is just the beginnings of management that works.
EMPTY...
OCCUPIED...
The old ways of animal husbandry...are a dying art form. The knowledge (or want) seems waning. The Fancy suffers greatly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Amberjem
So as I am sure y'all know fencing can be expensive............. what creative methods have ppl used that good bad fail, smart temporay
whatcha mean I'm mean? I coulda swore I been being nice ...what I do? now hahaEven got the Ft. Knox geesies to help out.
American Goose family
Thank you for the acknowledgement.
Trial by fire I guess and each time you fail you come away with a better plan of action...lovely that so many of our original breeders pass on due to old age...live long and prosper, eh.
Hee hee...no tour seeing the front and back gates...more a teaser to the entrance way to the secret garden. We've had many a looky-loo fail miserably on their drive-by's.
Jest for the record...a tour here is like the castaway trip...that it is a THREE HOUR tour is more reality. We have over 30 outbuildings and it does take at least a three hour trek to make the rounds. Here is one smidgen of a peaky of one spot where one building is...outta many...the New Orchard...
We are biosecure so no longer give tours (people may harbour ILT in their nostrils for 24 hours and we have no CRD here and don't want it either) but when we did, had to stop and have lunch and coffees on the Man Porch to rest up to get on with it. I tend to take this all for granted because I get to muck about in it everyday. Always something on the go, something to do, never bored, never pondering a purpose. I love it here...love it so much when I have the summer off I beg to go back to work because I am ever SO tired..."Please, please, send me back...too much fun...too much tromping about with dogs in tow, running hither and tither...running silly on the FUN farm."
October 2013 - New Orchard
I jest rejuvenated the strawberry barrels this past week or so
Emmy Lou the blue, turns one year old today. Lacy the red, is six days older than her. We have had them since August 4th when they flew over from NSW. Another pinch me unimaginable dream come true...dogs from their country of origin. I knew Cheryl because we were both Secretary's of each other's country's ACD club at the same time...been alot of years and never pondered it possible but it has been that way with alot of things we thought we might want and have achieved despite destiny. The two pairs of Black swans were like that...the one cob is from Holland and the two females from different lines out of the Southern States. Goes to show you that if you put your nose to the grindstone...you can make magical things happen.
Agreed that people may be the culprits that try to bring you pain, but you don't have to be willing receivers. Realizing there was going to be an ongoing issue and it needed to be resolved is not really painful...letting it continue is where the pain and agony might have happened, I guess. Rick says there is not alot of things you can't fix without throwing a good chunk of coin and energies at. You step up, you pay with resources like your time and money, and then you don't think about it any more--you fix it, you make it happy and joyous again, you remove "outsider people" from the equation and get back to the fun of living the good life. If it was not that incident, the country continues to get so full and divided up...it could well be happening now and I like that we made sure we were not going to be victimized by other people's shortcomings. If you lay around whining about how other people keep failing and negatively affecting YOUR ability to enjoy total happiness, now that would be misery in the making.
It really is of no consequence now and in fact a much enjoyed blessing to know we have a secure place to run wild and play silly in...we are not seeing our loved ones breach the property lines; we can relax and just suck up the knowledge that no harm is happening. Did we like having to triple fence, no but we would have been devastated to have to have one or some of our ACDogs put down. If you want something fixed right, you gotta do it yourself and be done with it. Do the people that caused the grief know, I doubt it and that in itself is testament to doing the right thing and tout sweet. Masters of your own destiny don't soar with eagles by being sensibly normal. Normal nowadays sucks crap...really a downer in my books.
If we lose even one of our specimens, it could be extinction and certainly genetic diversity put at risk. To run our Conservation Farm and do it right, the place has to be over the top special (yeh, I've receive awards stating I am not just special, but "SO" special...nyuck nyuck nyuck). We have acquired stocks that had 60 years invested in them by one master breeder...we have added our own swing on the thing to make them our own strain for the past 15 years, so that is a line of 75 years of intensive work. Not just one master breeder's work but many and we waited on some stocks for seven years to acquire...worth every milli-second too. No hatching eggs thanks...tried and tested, examinable in the hand adult stocks only. Proven worthy.
When breeding our stocks, we keep back only the top three percent (yes, 100 day olds is reduced to a trio that might, possibly be breeding prospect worthy)...for a small example, in our white bantam Wyandottes, this was done every year for decades before we acquired the lines and in the bantam Brahmas...their lines trace straight back to "Honest John" Kriner, the Senior, not Junior. Ducks going back in strains to the greats like Wallace. Then there is Frampton and Rowe's line of black Calls that use to whoop butt out on the East Coast...Rowe showed a display (yeh, look that up in poultry showing jargon eh...not just showing trios like I have but seven birds...all like peas in a pod...I did it once with my Calls, got a display bred up, but never did get to show them because of some fuddle duddle mixups with the show organizers...drat...could have been fun to have THAT feather in our cap!) of Blacks that Dr. Sherraw still raves about. I could chatter on but why bother. We keep the old lines, we have birds that retire and live beyond the age of 15 years because we feel they deserve to pass away in the shade of summer time...sorta like how I would like to go when its my time to push up posies.
The ditty that the fox only prefers the taste of the best of your best birds is totally true. Only the good die young...
Our fencing costs could have bought a nice house indeed--likely several houses paid in full. I spend every single penny of my yearly salary on BIRD FEED (gone to the birds literally)...Rick often reminds me at the start of a year, that while I may be working...I have NO money left for any other frivolity like haircuts, a cel phone, impractical dress shoes, bloomers...
Thankfully his employment tops up what mine is sadly short on and so it goes--can't be here doing the chores and working for wages. I could have bought and paid for a Taj Mahal for the humans long ago but in true farming type mentality...the animals' quarters exceed the human's abode by far. The house here in 1998 was valued at maybe $15,000 and at that it was a real stretch of imagination. When the porch fell literally off the house (foot thru), Rick paused and built the Man Porch for us & the dogs to flop in.
MAN PORCH
Good place for humans and ACDs...
not outside and yet, not quite inside either!
Now the house we call home is of the negative value...we need to vacate it and haul it away...probably cost ten grand to tear it up and bury the evidence at the landfill...bwa ha ha...or have a controlled burn I guess.Hee hee...BETTER HOMES & GARDEN ... nope, nada on the grand house, but lotsa gardens that are rather of the nicer sort.
When we bought, I went round taking soil samples and had the water chemically and biologically tested, needed to know how much water the well produced...those things mattered; the dirt and the H20 supply. Where I lay my head does not count because you shut your eyes and then the day dawns and you're up to your armpits in poo anyhoo...so who cares so long as the toilet flushes, the two sinks work in the kitchen for the flash meals on the fly (Bye, gotta get back outside again), and you can throw another log on the wood stove so you can rest your weary bones to eat your supper...and a place to wash up...we use to have two working toilets but well, uh, one is no longer useable and I'm fine with that. Animals come first and always will here. NO guessing who is last on the list for feeding and oft times you'll find us eating after the sun goes down...in summer that can be quite late.
There will never be a distress call out to the SPCA here...but Human Rights should be notified on what the slogging humans endure...rotten house to call home...an itty bitty home fulla love and purpose, eh.
Still nobody else raising the Pied form of the American Buff but I suspect not many willing to step up and pay three grand for fencing wire for geese much these days...oh well...whatever!
Not many want geese period...or heritage turks for that matter. Geese scream at 3 a.m. They hiss at you, you the unqualified to powder their butt servant type class. They are big, noisy, unsavoury towards the help, some get real nasty and savage...can be hard on the land if not caring for the land first over the potentially abusive inhabitants, and some have to be segregate so they don't beat the snot outta each other...geese can be a problem if not managed well...but the rewards exceed the hurdles. Now why does that reasoning sound familiar?
There are a bazillion head of waterfowl inside this duck barn...and all summer long they waddle abouts plaguing this lawn with their plops...how do you keep it so green? By diligently hosing it down for half an hour each evening...eliminating the smothering of the good grass. How many gonna step up and do that? Not many, so many and almost all say that ducks are messy. Nope, nada...ducks are not messy...it is how they are kept and how you deal with the potential to foul (fowl?) their environment; never too much water, rest the land, never subject the land to abusive beasts...the secret to successful co-habitation is to manage your land before you manage your livestocks; waterfowl kept on river sand, topped with oat straw is just the beginnings of management that works.
EMPTY...
OCCUPIED...
The old ways of animal husbandry...are a dying art form. The knowledge (or want) seems waning. The Fancy suffers greatly.
Yer mean Amber...unless yer a fan of the BYC Pear-A-Dice thread...how would one know?
I shared OUR fencing methods--you asked and did the "@" me too...
Chain link is the way to go when you want zero predation and gotta watch the pocket book. When money is no object...I would go with the six foot tall lawn fence.
We run a Conservation Farm, so that in itself makes us different than the run of the mill BYCer. Rick and I have a combination of over 90 years experience with livestock, poultry and canines. We are living the dream and it is great to be able to pursue (and attain) yer heart's desires. Not everyone gets to do that and many die trying. Golden years...every living breathing second now.
Our son has flown the roost, got a good life of his own now so the old couple can play to the max. Done our duties and now we are most silly every moment we are able. REtirement...TIRED but content, eh.
What pain? Pain never existed because we realized some mere "person" was trying to ruin our party--rain on our parade and threaten our happiness. The party goes on...and on, and on and with no hangover because we live within our means...what's to stop the fun from continuing? One needs to only work hard at eliminating threats to enjoy the peace and freedom to be masters of your own world. Bwa ha ha.
All joy, happiness and most of all FUN! I sicken many persons because we won't let others bring us down to their lower level. We're one of those oddities referred to nowadays as "keeners," like trying, failing & getting back up to do it again is some sort of bad thing. Go figure, eh.
I guess when problems hit, best solution is to take care of it yourselves and eliminate the issues. Which we have done--less stress, no mess. We'll be solvent in a few years...no debt, no worries--just working to pay for the ongoing ones like feed, seed, bedding, utilities and replace what gets worn out. If I die tomorrow, my last words will be "and we had a blast pushing the limits to see where it might fail!" Screaming down that toboggan hill and having parts so worn out nobody wants you to sign yer organ donor card...as Rick quips...too old to part out. <--yeh, that be the both of us...
Doggone & Chicken UP!
Tara Lee Higgins
Higgins Rat Ranch Conservation Farm, Alberta, Canada
