Relocate or Retaliate?

[emandmikey]

Quote:
Of everything said here, that may very well be the single most frightening statement yet. I spend a lot of time teaching my kids that if there is a law/rule/regulation they see as unfair, work on changing it. Go through the proper channels and make it fair. Can't even begin to imagine having a "if it is a rule I see as unreasonable I can can break it" mentality.

Wow - yeah - that statement frightens me too. I think that there are good reasons for the laws we have. Unfortunatly some of them make it harder for certain people to do the things they want to do, but if you don't agree, using the proper channels is the way to go.

 

[panner123]

Quote:
Panner, first you complain about the cost of building Chicken Fort Knox -- then you admit that you don't even close your gates at night, much less actually try to keep your birds in a secure area. What do you EXPECT to have happen??

Don't need to lock up anything here, I don't even have a lock on my front or back door of my house. What I have around my property keeps most things save most of the time. The times it doesn't, the things I have in the house takes care of. Few dollars a month for the power to keep the fence and alarms working. A little over a buck for the times something makes it though my first line of defense. The two legged predator cost me a lot more than all the predators in the last twenty five years. Fuel cost are way up to run a back hoe. I may speak to soon, but I have not lose a chicken to a coon or fox in well over five years. So I think my first line must be working. Bear bobcat and montian lion keep me on my toes all the time. It is a lot less trouble to S S S, than to deal with most government officals.

 

[amazondoc]

I have a lot of sympathy with people who are forced to take actions like getting depredation permits AFTER they have already tried their best to keep their chickens safe with secure coops and yards and other measures. But I must admit that I get intensely irritated at people who won't even pen their birds at night, but nonetheless go around pontificating about the need to kill every predator in sight.

But that's just me, of course.

 

[buck-wild-chick]

I personally, Retaliate

 

[ninjapoodles]

Quote:
Both coyotes and owls (especially great horned owls) are predators of raccoons.

We have neither of those. Honestly--there is nothing here that preys on raccoons. Nothing. That leaves them free to reproduce as much as can be supported by raiding local homes. They were a huge problem to us long before we had chickens.

The fact that they will come right to the doors of our home, despite our motion-sensors, extra lighting, multiple fences, and SEVEN dogs, tells me that we have way more raccoon population than there is food in the woods to support. If they had plenty to eat, why would they risk coming into enemy territory to scavenge? We park our cars right outside our front door, and there is raccoon poop on the vehicles every morning. I'm sorry, but that's a problem. (Not the presence of the poop, but the indication that they're just that brazen.)

I trust the Game & Fish Commission in our case. After all, wildlife conservation is their business. I'll try to scan our depredation permit and post a picture of it so people can see what I'm talking about.

Edited because I got trigger happy on the "post" button.

 

[amazondoc]

Hey Ninja --

See my post from 7:35PM. I've got no major argument with ya, you seem to be doing the best you can with a tough situation!

 

[ninjapoodles]

Oh, I know.

And I should mention that what our permit allows is depredation at night. The way it was explained to us, we can do "whatever [we] need to do" during daylight hours, but the permit was required to legally "hunt" these predators at night.

Does that make sense?

 

[amazondoc]

Oh, P.S. --

Just for accuracy's sake, both coyotes and great horned owls are present throughout Arkansas (coyotes, for instance, have been recorded in each and every Arkansas county). But that doesn't change the difficulty of the situation you find yourself in!

 

[ninjapoodles]

Quote:
Oh, I have no doubt they're present somewhere in our county! And any other county, for that matter. They're just not present where I live. We're in one of those odd "semi-rural" areas. We're surrounded on all four sides by neighbors with small acreage (like 5 acres each), and there is a strip of trees on one side which is, I'm assuming, where the raccoon, deer, 'possum and fox hang out. There's a house through the trees on that side, too.

Here are the GoogleMaps aerial of our place, zooming further out each shot--you can't seen the fences, but there are several:

 

[amazondoc]

I love Google and Mapquest satellite pics. I've been playing with them a LOT since I got the place in Lebanon this spring.

I'll bet you've got both coyotes and GHO within a quarter mile of your place. But since I don't plan on going over there to find em, we might as well agree to disagree on that one.

It doesn't change your situation, in any case!