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Ratting
May 4, 2010 19:17:39 GMT -6
Post by bkeepr on May 4, 2010 19:17:39 GMT -6
With the warm weather has come a crop of these nasty rats to eat the chicken and goose food. I put out those pet-proof covered bait boxes but the rats just seem to eat the bait and laugh, and then when I open the box there is a freaking black widow as fat as a grape. Yuck.
So now I am putting out Have a Heart traps, and plan to get some regular rat traps to put in the chicken yard after dark. Today I caught a rat in the garden and then moved the trap to the chicken yard and had another rat in less than an hour. Pearl is learning to kill them. She didn't mess around with the garden rat because it was big, just sank her teeth into it and killed it. The little chicken yard rat was young so she played with it like a cat. She still hasn't figured out to give them a shake.
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Ratting
May 5, 2010 18:09:42 GMT -6
Post by Clifford on May 5, 2010 18:09:42 GMT -6
Jazz will kill them too... But, she also likes to eat them, and I cannot tolerate that!
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Post by bkeepr on May 8, 2010 7:23:11 GMT -6
Pearl prefers squirrels to rats and so do I!
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Ratting
May 9, 2010 11:12:41 GMT -6
Post by rebeccaferrell on May 9, 2010 11:12:41 GMT -6
Beware my friends..Amos is on Fladgyle this week because of bacterial infection in his lower intestines. Vet said most likely due to eating SQUIRRELS!!
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Ratting
May 11, 2010 5:43:07 GMT -6
Post by bkeepr on May 11, 2010 5:43:07 GMT -6
Whoa! What were Amos's symptoms? And I hope he gets better quickly. I have waaaaaay more rats than I thought. I was letting my garden area in front lay fallow except for some potatoes. It is beside a metal storage building on a concrete pad. The rats have tunneled under the pad and dug tunnels so extensively in the garden that when you walk the ground caves in about 6 inches. I had some Jerusalem artichokes that we had planned to dig up and eat... too late, the rats got them. I have one of those tamper-proof bait boxes and will put it out there. We have owls, hawks, foxes and coyotes but the rats stay ahead of all of them. Rat b-a-stards!
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Ratting
May 11, 2010 7:04:31 GMT -6
Post by rebeccaferrell on May 11, 2010 7:04:31 GMT -6
OH, Kathy "Rat B-a-stards" is one of my favorite sayings. Like where in the world did this come from? okay, this is really really gross. I suspect that Amos has had this a while because some time ago he crapped in his kennel at night which he never does. But it was a FOUL icky, splattery mess. I wrote it off to "must have been" something he ate! So time passed. Well this week he crapped on the dog room floor..splattery piles of the foulest of foul. Our rule is whoever sees it first cleans it up. So the first time I laughed in bed as Ben cleaned it up and he was heaving as he did it. Next am I cleaned it up, thankfully, because not only was FOUL unusual but I found blood in it. NOT GOOD. So I cleaned it up but saved some in a freezer bag to take to the vet. Now this sh*t was sealed tight but by the time I got to work the odor had permeated the entire truck. GACK!!!! So I threw it in the bed and called the vet. Since we know he's not wormy this was ruled out so no poop speciman was necessary. When I explained the symptoms the vet tech said what she thought it was. I then asked if eating squirrels could cause this.. YES most definitetly..any wild critter, raw. If you'll remember, some months back I shot a squirrel and Amos ate it. So, the only way you'll notice anything wrong is to look at their poop. He had no other symptoms. My dogs go way back in the woods to poop so this is not something that I normally see. Poor fellow...I felt so bad for him.
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Ratting
May 12, 2010 5:44:48 GMT -6
Post by bkeepr on May 12, 2010 5:44:48 GMT -6
Nasty!!!! Was it giardia? Poor Amos, he must have had to go really bad to poo in his crate. We have the "first one to see it/smell it cleans up" rule too.
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Ratting
May 12, 2010 19:02:49 GMT -6
Post by rebeccaferrell on May 12, 2010 19:02:49 GMT -6
She didn't mention Giardia, I'd have remembered that since I'm familiar with the term. But it may have been this? She just said that dogs can pick up stuff from eating raw animals. I just know that my dogs will never get a raw critter from me again.
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