[at-l] silent spring

[askowronek@mindspring.com (Amy)]

rick boudrie wrote:



> kits.  When we got new neighbors with 3 or 4 outdoor cats, those visits 
> stopped.  You ever see a house cat square off against a red fox?  Not a 
> pretty sight.  The cat sits there looking unfazed while the fox screams 
> like it came right out of hell.  Goes on forever.  Untill the wild 
> animals move out of the area to avoid the stress.  Not that there is 
> much place for them to go.


I think all your wild animals showed up at my place.  I manage a horse
farm smack dab in the middle of the suburbs.  We get wild goose, deer,
foxes, bunnies, some kind of large burrowing creatures..  pretty much
anything that's still left in this area shows up at our farm.

The foxes don't always lose btw.  We had a crazy neighbor come by
in a rampage because a fox killed his cat.  We weren't very happy
about him and his shotgun but we let him go rather than have a
gun toting crazy man mad at us.  (Previous crazy neighbors have
taken potshots at me, the horses, guinea hens.. found a guinea
hen shot in our mares field a while back.)

The sad thing here is that the fox population is doing pretty well,
reproductionwise, but vulpine mange is rampant.  We've found three
foxes dead of mange in a year.  It doesn't seem to affect any other
species, for which I am grateful.  From my reading it sounds like
a horrid way to go.

-amy