Cat and Mouse

For the past five minutes, I have been watching our cat wander around the livingroom carrying a mouse in his mouth. He cannot seem to figure out what to do with it. He wants to put it down, but then changes his mind. He wants to show it to me, but then when I reach out to take it from him, he runs away. Since I started typing, he has made his decision. He batted the dead mouse around for about thirty seconds and is now eating it, head first. The crunching sound is making me cringe. I wonder how it is possible that such a thing tastes good. Well, apparently it doesn’t. He just threw up all over the floor. I’ll be right back…

OK, I’m back.

Living in a farmhouse built in 1820, I am used to living with mice, although I cannot quite get used to having them dropped, often still alive, by the cat in our bed late at night. Gregor loves to share. He is an excellent mouser, in fact, he is an excellent hunter, period. During the spring, when we are plagued with cluster flies, Gregor probably gets a third of his nutrition from eating them. He can snatch a fly out of the air as easily as you or I would catch a gently tossed baseball. His brother, Samsa, who died a few months ago of kidney failure, was a terrible mouser. I do not think he caught a single mouse in his entire life. Whenever we heard the cacophonous crash of the hunt, we could be sure that Samsa would be watching Gregor go after his prey, trotting excitedly after his brother as he crashed with abandon from one side of the room to the other, up over chairs, between book shelf and stove, under ottomans and couches, until he had the mouse trapped between his paws and then clamped in his jaws. If the mouse happened to get away from Gregor, Gregor sat and waited. And waited. An hour later he would be waiting still. Samsa having long ago lost interest would have left him to go curl up on a chair for a nap. Gregor is reckless and will leap five feet or more through the air off the back of a chair just to get up onto the fireplace mantel before realizing there is nothing really exciting up there and thumping back down on the floor. Samsa would look and ponder, calculating the distance and the height, and invariably sit back down, pretending of course, as cats are wont to do, that he never had had any interest in getting up there in the first place.

Gregor’s mouse exploits have a deep significance for me. I identify very strongly with him. As a livestock farmer I am, after all, the most canned of hunters. Whenever I hear him crashing around, or feel the cool slick fur of a mouse on my cheek or sliding down my thigh through my sleep, or whenever I see Gregor carrying (proudly, I believe) a mouse dangling from his mouth, epsecially when the mouse is alive and struggling to get free, I think about this natural cruelty. It is cruel; I don’t know what else to call it. Its naturalness does not obviate its cruelty. I wonder how and if Gregor’s cruel hunts reflect on my own. Dare I make a natural analogy? Gregor tortures his prey, for shorter or longer periods of time, depending on…depending on what, something that I might call his mood? Depending perhaps on nothing but chance or coincidence. If the mouse happens to be clamped in Gregor’s mouth in such a way that its windpipe is constricted, it suffocates and dies. If Gregor bites down too hard when he snatches it up off the ground after releasing it and letting it scamper away a few feet, he breaks its neck and it dies, sort of like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. Or, perhaps I am under-anthropomorphizing. Perhaps Gregor really is more intentional than that. Perhaps he does have moods that make him more or less cruelly playful. Perhaps he knows exactly what he is doing. And what is the mouse’s experience of all of this?

What, if any, connection is there between the tortured cruel death of prey animals by predators, whether the torture and cruelty is intentional or not, and the slaughter, humane or not, of my livestock? Is it natural for me to caringly raise livestock, load them on a trailer and drive them to their deaths? Would it be more natural if I, myself, did the killing? Is the question of nature even relevant? Gregor sees a mouse, attacks it, plays with it, kills it, and, if he is hungry, eats it. That, simply, is what he does. Why, then, is what I do so hard, so complicated, so unsimple? Why cannot I, simply, do what I do? Why must I play cat and mouse with myself? Why can’t I just accept what I do, and that it is bloody and messy and irrevocable?

 

Buzzed by a Hawk

Yesterday my sister-in-law came out with her kids to play on the farm. The kids had a great time feeding the pigs long thick stems of golden rod that is growing along the edge of the hedgerow. The pigs would pull the golden rod sticks out of the kids’ hands and then shake them around, chomping on them. Every now and then the pigs would get spooked by the kids and they would run off, barking. My little nephew loved when they barked and ran, even though it startled him. Every time they did it, he looked at me and quietly mimiced their barking. It was very cute. Once my niece held onto the golden rod for a half second too long and the pig nearly pulled her into the pasture with it. “Whoa,” she said dusting herself off as stood back up.

While we were walking away from the pigs down the field road, all of a sudden, we were buzzed by a hawk. It flew past us about ten feet away and only four feet from the ground. I think it was going after my nephew, to whom I was giving a ride on my shoulders. At the last minute, the hawk had decided he was too big. Just kidding. The hawk was obviously after the chickens, who had squawked and disappeared into the hedgerow when they spied the hawk. The hawk traveled the full length of the field at about four feet high, before gracefully gliding up to about twenty feet and settling into a tree at the end of the field.

Two days ago, I was very distressed to hear the screech of a hawk nearby while I was on my way to the pig field, and I was more distressed to see it circling overhead. To have it buzz us in the field with all of the chickens about was more distressing still. All of the chicks are present and accounted for, but I won’t be able to count the chickens until I let them out this morning.

I hope the hawk is just passing through and not making the pig field and its tasty chicken morsels its new hunting ground. If so, I’ll have to put up streamers with cut out rings from aluminum cans in an effort to keep it away from the chickens.

 

A Trail of Feathers

Yesterday when I went to feed and water the animals at noon, I discovered two piles of feathers right up against the bottom of the outside of the poultry netting, and a distinct trail of them leading into the hedgerow. At first, I thought two chickens had been killed, but when I counted them, only one was missing. I think there are two piles because during the chase, the chicken, which either had escaped from the poultry netting sometime in the morning after I opened the coop or had been making an effort to reenter the poultry netting after spending the night in the hedgerow, ran into the poultry netting as it attempted to get away from whatever was chasing it, which of course just made it easier for the predator to pin the chicken down. However, I think the chicken escaped from that initial pin, leaving behind a pile of feathers. The second time the chicken ran headlong into the netting, however, the predator was able to get a good hold of the chicken and the chase was over. The predator picked the chicken up in its mouth, turned, and carried it into the hedgerow.

Curious, I followed the trail of feathers into the hedgerow. At first, the trail was very distinct, with lots of feathers littering the ground. But, after a while, the feathers started to get more sparse. Perhaps at first the chicken was still struggling, or the many feathers that were loosened in the struggle were the ones that were falling off. Once inside the hedgerow, two things were clear, the predator was small and it was traveling along a well-worn path down the middle of the hedgerow. It was clear that the animal was small because the path was only about six inches wide and the brambly branches grew together above the path only about a foot high. As I moved forward, crouched down, along the path, I had to pull the branches apart in order to keep moving. Initially, I had assumed it was a coyote, but once on the path, I realized it was something smaller. Another reason I realized it was something small is that in spite of the fact that there was some pretty soft exposed dirt along the path, I never saw one really distinct foot print. There were a few scuff marks and I thought a few times I could see the indentation of a few claws, but not once could I make out a clear foot print. For some reason, I never thought of a fox, which is what Jen suggested when I told her about it last night. It was almost certainly a fox.

Without thinking about it, I assumed that the predator would run with the chicken into the hedgerow and quickly eat it. Instead, it ran with the chicken in the hedgerow and went all the way down the hedgerow, quickly across the farm road at its end, and into the woods. I was able to follow the trail for about 150 feet into the woods before losing it. The last bit of the trail that I saw were three small brown and white feathers a couple of feet from the base of a tree. I looked up into the tree, but there were no nests or anything, and I figured that if the critter had climbed the tree with the chicken and eaten it up there, the base of the tree would be littered with feathers. No, I realized that all that had happened was that the distance between the last pile of feathers that I had found and the next was too great for me to follow, or that the next feather or feathers were simply too hard for me to find amongst the shadows and light colored leaf litter. I walked a half circle about ten feet out from the feathers, scanning in all directions, but couldn’t pick the trail back up, so I gave up and went back to feed the animals. All in all, I followed the trail about eight hundred feet. There is no telling how far the animal carried the chicken before getting wherever it was going.

That makes two laying hens lost to predators, which considering that the chickens are living in a field surrounded by woods on three sides at the base of a big hill about a quarter of a mile from the nearest human presence, isn’t that bad. I refuse to kill predators (although I kill pigeons in the barn and mice in my house — go figure my inconsistencies and contradictions!). It is my responsibility to come up with or adjust the management of my animals in ways that don’t encourage, or actively discourage, predation, without resorting to killing or harming the predators. I suppose the reason I don’t kill predators is not so much that I think it is cruel, after all, I kill the animals that I carefully raise for months and months. The reason is that predators, of which there are relatively few, population-wise, serve an important ecological function, and I am committed to ecological farming. If I kill all of the predators, then the ecological balance of the local ecosystem within which I am farming gets thrown all out of whack and I end up with all sorts of other pests that do things like eat all of my corn. Take deer for example. We have such a deer problem because the wolves were killed off years and years ago. Coyotes, of which we have plenty, will kill fawns of course, but they only kill adult deer occasionally. A coyote is much happier to kill smaller mammals. So, on the land I farm, predators are welcome, sort of.

One thing I did find in the hedgerow were a lot of the eggs I have been missing. Here was a pile. There was a pile. There was one egg. There was another. Damn chickens! So far, setting up the poultry netting around the coop that provides the the chickens with a small grassy paddock to run around in during the morning, which I leave closed until the noon feeding, has solved the egg problem. I am now getting about forty three eggs a day from fifty, now forty-nine chickens, minus one super broody hen that is driving me nuts. That is up from twenty four eggs when they were laying in the hedgerow.