A Sad Farewell to a Friend

2 February 2009

Last week proved to be one of my hardest yet. After much discussion, weighing up the pros and cons and trying desperately to find a solution I was forced to accept that 3 boars on our property is 1 too many. Spotty arrived on the property at 8 weeks of age, destined to be pork chops at 6 months of age. He got to 6 months and it seemed all too soon to say goodbye. When Arthur arrived they became best mates and then Stanley arrived and Spotty adopted him as a little brother. Time passed and Belle arrived. Spotty had to go and I accepted the fact. I wanted him to go live on another farm but in the end we knew he would be hard to find a home for and he would never have as good a life elsewhere as he does here. He would go to the butcher but we would mate him with Belle first so we would have offspring to remember him by. But Belle refused and eventually proved too much hassle to keep herself. A cantankerous loner of a sow she badly attacked Spotty and we sent her to the butcher. Spotty was bruised and sad and as I hugged him and dressed his wounds I began to see him as a pet and a friend. Life changes though and Spotty and Arthur became enemies in an unexpected battle that lasted many hours. The battle changed both boys and Spotty started to spar with Stanley, clearly readying himself for another fight. Before long we would have to keep all 3 boars separate and out of sight from each other. There was nowhere for Spotty to go. I accepted the inevitable and Aaron arranged Spotty’s final journey. With Aaron home all last week I said goodbye to Spotty on Tuesday evening and with great difficulty held it together at work all Wednesday. I arrived home with a heavy heart only to discover that Aaron had tried all day to get Spotty into the trailer. Stanley got in quite happily but Spotty had refused. My help was needed. I was absolutely horrified. And so we walked down to the paddock and after 20 minutes of coaxing he was in and the door was shut. He bashed himself against the door to open it and I lost it. I cried so hard I struggled to breathe. Aaron drove away and I watched as he disappeared up the highway with Spotty, a lone figure in the back of the trailer. I cried all night, only switching off the tears as I got up for work. And so I’ve shed just a few tears since. I cannot keep grieving as this was his destiny. Had he been sold to someone else he would have lived only half as long. In truth, I do not think that I grieve for a life lost but more for the part I played. I feel guilty for being part of the process. It is true that it is better not to become attached to animals destined for the freezer but to raise happy animals requires their trust. And perhaps unfortunately, pigs enjoy human company and so become friends very quickly. I know I am making a mistake spending so much time with the piglets but when I see how much they enjoy back scratches and belly rubs I believe it is only me who suffers for it in the end. At least these piglets have a chance to live, if only for a little while. I shall miss Spotty but as with our other animals I shall move on. The Requests Keep on Coming Now that we have become CouchSurfing and HelpX hosts we are being inundated with requests from people wanting to stay. We are booked from now until the end of March with guests and are now having to say no to people. Gwen, Helen and Emily returned on Friday and left this morning. It was lovely to have them here for the last 2 weekends, although perhaps I have been less of a good host this weekend. In order to cope with Spotty’s departure I have withdrawn into myself a bit these past few days. I cannot believe the amount of help Gwen and her girls have given us. They did so much around the garden and then made all our meals and did our dishes for us. Yet as wonderful as it was, I felt so guilty I insisted they stay out of the kitchen last night. Gwen is just a whirr of activity and I felt quite exhausted seeing just how much she accomplishes in her day. Her girls are equally disciplined. Perhaps it is a French thing. I cannot imagine that I would be as perfect a guest. But of course these perfect guests leave us with a bit of a dilemma. Now we have seen just how much we can achieve with the help of guests part of me wants to cancel our membership with CouchSurfing and just invite Helpers to stay instead. This is of course the selfish, needy part of me rearing its ugly head. I so desperately want to be a more giving, less selfish person yet it is a daily struggle in my head to accept that it is better to give than receive. It’s not just my decision either of course. As the year passes and we receive more guests we’ll gain a better understanding of what is best for us and our property.

Helpers Galore

28 January 2009

What can I say? 2009 is turning out to be a fabulous year already.

Gwen and her daughters arrived Friday evening and Ben and Lily returned on Saturday. It was a fantastic weekend full of good conversation, laughter and good food. Without prompting, as we worked on the farm on Saturday morning, Gwen weeded our sadly neglected front garden, even potting a begonia for our front door stop. “Your house needs flowers” she said. We were gob-smacked.

Our guests helped us with building, gardening, cooking and dishes and acted like it was an honour to do it. Gwen has even asked if she and her daughters can return for up to a week, working in exchange for accommodation and meals.

The decision to become CouchSurfing hosts has far exceeded my expectations. Prior to joining I was feeling a strong need to give and to share with others but in a way that would not draw on finances I don’t have. This has fulfilled that need and better still, not only am I giving but I am also receiving. I hope that by the end of 2009 I can say I am a much less selfish person and that I have learnt to be more tolerant, patient and giving.

Here piggily, piggily, piggily!

I am officially pig mad. The piglets are just adorable. Having finally grown accustomed to my daily presence they now rush to see me as I enter the paddock. Four of them can’t wait to get their back scratches and belly rubs.

Georgie Pie and Con(cussion) are more wary. They don’t like to miss out on the action but still find human touch quite unnerving.

The belly rubs are quite possibly the funniest thing to watch. One starts by scratching a piglet gently down the spine, followed by a good, gentle rump scractch. Quickly move the hand to the tummy and rub. This causes the piglets legs to become stiff and paralysed with intense pleasure, resulting in the piglet falling on its side, where it just lies there in raptures as one continues to rub. Meanwhile the other piglets all standing around grunting excitably in a “Me next! Me next!” kind of manner.

Finally, at 4 weeks of age the piglets are becoming quite curious about solid food. In fact last night Aaron advised that the piglets jumped en masse into Joy’s trough at dinner time so that he had to spread dinner into 2 troughs so that Joy could actually get to the food. This is a good sign.

The piglets are growing incredibly fast and despite there only being 6 of them their feeding needs are so big that Joy has lost a huge amount of weight. Although she is not unhealthily thin we have had to double her intake of food just to keep her weight steady.

If only it were that easy to lose weight for human mothers! Although it is standard to increase a sow’s food intake I wonder if her diet of fruit and veg makes her milk extra tasty. The piglets seem to feed frequently and sometimes I think the only respite Joy gets is when she is submerged in a wallow.

Phyllis is missing her sister a lot but I think that Joy really is too busy with piglets to feel the same. As yet we have not moved Phyllis back in with Joy as I cannot decide when it will be best to do so. Phyllis is only 3 weeks away from being a mother herself. Her pregnancy has gone well this time and she seems much more comfortable with the idea of being a mother.

Ducks vs Chickens

Life is not good for our broody hen. She only laid 2 eggs and has subsequently broken one. She is virtually refusing to eat and drink anything and her health is declining rapidly.

Now we have a dilemma. If she continues this lunacy she will die. Yet, she is now so unhealthy that if we were to forcibly remove her from her nest and put her outside, the other chickens would surely kill her. I feel as though our only hope is that her egg hatches next week and she returns to normal behaviour. I’m not sure she’ll last that long though.

As for the other hen, she refuses to lay. Or if she is laying she’s doing it in places we can’t find. We are now spending a small fortune on these useless, annoying creatures and getting nothing in return.

As for our ducks, well they’ve stuck around, they’re becoming more relaxed around us and have so far laid 2 eggs. The egg situation is not a major as we’re not expecting them to really start laying for another 2-3 months. What they are doing, which absolutely delights me, is slowly moving around both sides of the gully, trampling all the weeds down and revealing the young shrubs planted last year.

Like every other area we have planted, the shrubs were slowly being swallowed up by the grass and weeds. For the first 2 years we usually have to cut the grass away in order for the plants to survive but we appear to have found a solution for this part of the garden.

I had been told by various people that one of the problems with ducks is the huge amounts of poop they generate. This may be the case with a standard duck but I have discovered that a Runner Duck’s poop is in fact liquid and therefore it just soaks straight into the ground. This is fantastic. There’s no waste to clean up and we have ourselves one fast acting fertiliser.

The chickens on the other hand continue to poop everywhere but the garden, in great big globs that set like concrete. Depending on how much they free range the chickens’ appetites change daily. Subsequently, if we feed them too much the sparrows and mynahs quickly move in and consume anything left.

The ducks are now free ranging and also have fluctuating feed requirements, however their food is placed in a bowl of water. If they don’t finish their meal it sits there undisturbed until the ducks get hungry again.

Our chickens crow and squawk loudly as they roam the verandah and patio and our ducks just quack nicely at the bottom of the garden. I’ve told Aaron that at this stage I want more ducks and less chickens.

Disturbing Farming Practices

The Internet is a wonderful tool when it comes to quickly accessing answers to problem situations. Take our broody hen for instance. I flicked through a large number of our lifestyle block magazines to find information on obsessive, broody birds. Despite there being a chicken article in every issue the information provided is at times so basic as to be useless. It seems that always the advice is to take a sick chook to the vet. Which is just fine if you have oodles of money to throw away. Quite frankly we don’t. It would cost more to visit the vet than to buy a new chicken.

So of course the next place to look is the Internet. Unfortunately our connection is appallingly slow at the moment. In fact it is at times so slow it just stops. And it will stay stopped for hours. But that’s another story…

So on this occasion I looked it up at work. As with any Internet based advice it pays to check about 10 sites to find an average or common opinion. And in this case I discovered it is of popular opinion that a sick chook should be fed cat jellymeat or cat biscuits to give it a good source of protein, vitamins, minerals, etc.

Even some vets and a bird centre recommended it. That was good enough for me. And so I went to the supermarket after work and tried to choose a suitable product. There were numerous tins, packets and boxes to choose from. Talk about choice! Obviously I wasn’t going to choose chicken but what about lamb, beef or rabbit?

I looked at the ingredients listed. For each the main base ingredient was chicken. I looked at every brand and every type of packet and every one was the same. Okay, fair enough, let’s try fish – tuna or salmon, minced or flaked.

I couldn’t believe it. I must have spent 30 minutes reading the ingredient labels for every cat food product and every single one of them listed its main ingredient as chicken. I was disturbed on 2 levels. Every cat food product has what one has to assume is non-free range chicken in it. That means that if I owned a cat I would be helping to continue the torture of battery chickens even though I would not consider eating a non free range chicken myself.

Secondly, and most disturbingly of all, there are quite literally hundreds of people globally who would think nothing of feeding their sick chooks cat food, based on advice they gather from the Internet. I’ve even found duck keeping sites that suggest that cat biscuits can be added to a duck’s meal selection to increase vitamin and mineral variety.

Is it only me that remembers that the reason mad cow disease (CJD) appeared on the scene is because cows were being fed beef by-products? Now I’m not suggesting that people are feeding their poultry cat food on a regular basis but quite frankly, even once is too much for my liking.

What the hell kind of lethal human disease are we potentially breeding in our chickens? And so we may not eat the poultry that consumes the chicken products but what about the eggs? We wouldn’t eat an egg from a sick chicken but what of those eggs produced by healthy birds that get the occasional cat food supplement? Should we think twice about buying free range eggs from a farm gate? Do we only trust commercial free range eggs or are they in fact less trustworthy, as was the case with the CJD scare in cattle?

I’ve quite started to freak myself out with all this information really. Here I am wanting to make ethical food choices for myself and my animals and yet my ability to do so is severely restricted.

And so, left with little option I returned to the human aisles and bought a small tin of tuna for our sick hen. And of course I’m left with another dilemma now. No I don’t own cats but I do own dogs and I suspect if I start looking at the ingredient labels I will discover that they are all chicken based, even though I have been buying only beef and lamb varieties.

What would be even worse is discovering that there are pork products in them too. I’m actually too scared to look because I don’t actually know what an alternative option would be. We just don’t have enough livestock to provide meat for both humans and dogs. If only we could shoot all those damn rabbits on the block and turn them into dog tucker.

Catch that wascally wabbit!

The rabbits are getting cunning. They seem to have discovered that if they only hang around in paddocks with animals in then they have a better chance for survival. Subsequently we are seeing a lot of rabbits hopping around casually among pigs and sheep. We can’t release the dogs in the paddocks as they will scare the sheep, and we can’t take shots at the rabbits for fear we will hit one of our livestock. If we put traps next to burrows how do we stop curious livestock from getting caught? We can’t lay bait as a dead bunny is a yummy bunny to a dog.

There’s the run over it if you see it on the driveway method but boy those little buggers move fast. Aaron finally managed to hit one last week. He was adamant he’d killed it but we couldn’t find its body. It didn’t matter, after 2 days in the summer heat one of the dogs found it and over the following 2 days they fought over it until it was consumed, fur and all. Oooh gross! Still, I’m not going to deny them the taste for bunny.

Bonjour Mon Ami!

22 January 2009French tourists invaded our home again last weekend. Actually ‘invaded’ is probably not the right word. Filled it with happiness and sunshine is probably a better way of looking at it. Ben and Lily arrived Friday evening, greeted, as with all our guests, by 2 very excited dogs. From the start we hit it off. Both in their 20’s they have only been in NZ a month and are in the process of leaving Northland and heading south. They spent 2 full days and nights with us, wanting to be involved in and help out with everything we do. They cooked us meals did our dishes and helped us build our coolstore. When it came time for them to leave on Sunday I asked them to stay. They thought about it for a couple of hours and agreed. I have not laughed so much in a long time. The great thing with travellers is they’re on a natural high and it’s highly infectious. And so on Monday they asked if they could return this coming weekend for a few hours so they can help us finish building our coolstore. We happily accepted the offer of help and I look forward to seeing them again. This coming weekend we also have a French woman and her 2 daughters staying with us so I suspect the air will be alive with French accents. Gwen, who arrives Friday has already offered to have dinner cooking by the time I get home from work. Of course I immediately asked her if she’d consider moving in permanently. We were supposed to have more French CouchSurfers last weekend but they never turned up. In the end I received an email message to say they’d lost their phone and with it our contact details so were unable to find us. We had Kiwi CouchSurfers due to arrive this week but they failed to commit to a date and time and then about 8pm last night they asked if they could arrive in 3 hours. I said no as politely as I could. They would have arrived while we were in bed and left after we’d gone to work. Aaron was indifferent about the situation but my feeling is we’re voluntary hosts offering free accommodation in exchange for friendship. We’re not a business. In the end there’s only so much I will put myself out for someone. The CouchSurfers were okay about it. Shit happens I guess. We still have an Australian couple and a Welsh couple to host in the next few weeks plus friends and family on 2 weekends. I think maybe that’s all I can handle for now. I don’t like turning people down so hopefully we don’t receive any more Couch Surfing requests for the next couple of months. Mind you, summer will be over by then so maybe requests will dry up.