Lots of you told me that the sheep was sick. Bowling ball poop is not normal. I believed you, but I didn’t take it seriously enough to DO something. But now, it’s too late. Sylvie and Lily are gone. It was a parasite. A month after the sheep was gone from our yard, so were they.
Then of course, the free range chickens started disappearing. Free range chicken = dead chicken…if there are no larger animals in the yard to scare away the hawks. It looked like a feather explosion.
So, anyone else accidentally wipe out their barnyard before? It’s so sad. We won’t even go back there and it’s been months. We won’t even mow.
But now the bug man says that all the wolf spiders in the house are from not mowing. Next comes mice. This is all very un-fun. Any animal related trauma in your world?
Barnyard sadness . . . losing animals is so hard . . . We had a neighbor’s pit bulls rip up our chain linked enclosure and kill all of our chickens. The devastation was horrific . . . It left us feeling so low. I can understand your not wanting to get the visual of emptiness and the loss by avoiding the area . . . You really have been dealing with so much . . .
We, also, have the mice issue at times. I’m not a fan . . . I lose the animals I want to gain the most rude move in the house ones! They are definitely NOT related to the sweet little critters in Cinderella, that’s for sure!
Caring for any animal can be tricky. They can’t really tell us what is going on. Even our different vets (there is no vet that cares for all the different critters we have) have been confounded at times.
Oh, so sad! Keeping animals is always a conundrum. There are such sorrows to balance out the joys. We were keeping a friend’s dog once while they were having housing problems, and she (the dog) decided to chew into our daughter’s favorite duck, which we then had to kill. I’m not sure daughter has ever forgiven us for taking in the dog. We always loved keeping ducks and geese, but you have the same predation problems that you do with chickens. And ICK to the spiders.
We had about 20 goats and 10 of them were babies. One mother goat had 4 babies and she was so good she had nap times for them and everything. Our barn started on fire one winter night and as I ran out I could hear the baby goats screaming in terror. They were all killed. It was devastating. I was so grateful that the barn was far enough from the house to not start it on fire. It has taken a few years to heal and a lot of talks with my children about life and death but we are okay now. It will always be sad that your animals died but one day it won’t sting your heart quite so bad.
We had a good-sized homestead herd of Nubians. A lady that bought a doeling from us last year let us know that she had tested positive for CAE. Must be a testing error, or her own fault because we bought “safe and tested” goats from reputable herds. Haha! Only one of our goats, the single goat we bought as an adult, tested negative. And since we were sure they were safe, we’d had no problems giving extra milk to the (goat) kids over the years. Which means they ALL got it. We culled all but the clean goat, our 3-legged goat (incidentally, we’re pretty sure she’s Patient Zero) and Gimpy’s twins. It sucks being a farmer sometimes. Culling Gimpy this fall, using her buck to breed the clean goat and a new doe and then selling both twins. It’s been a long time since we only had two goats.
So sorry about the loss of your critters. It is very sad. I used to have a farm, and goats, and chickens, and cows, etc. But we had to sell it when I lost my job. Funny thing, I never really appreciated the farm all that much while I was still working. It was only when I lost my job, and thus my means to keep the farm, that I truly appreciated having it. And living that way.
Now: mow your yard, before you get mice!