Should He Stay or Should He Go?

We've had a visitor in our barn almost every night for the past couple of months.  He's leaving his calling card - piles of poop all over the hay.  It looked like possum poop to me.  Funny thing is, there were no chickens missing.  Possums kill chickens.  When they do, they leave most of the carcass behind.  It's always frustrated me because I think, "If you're gonna kill my chickens, eat them.  Clean your plate.  Don't kill them and leave most of the body behind.  That's very wasteful."

So our culprit was not killing our laying hens, but was in the barn.  Why was he coming in the barn?  I got to thinking about it and discussing it with Tricia and we both noticed that we haven't seen ANY rats in the barn.  We researched and found that possums DO eat rats.  So perhaps this possum is doing us a favor and cleaning out the rats.  But there's another variable.  We know that there is also a big rat snake in the barn taking care of the rats, too.  We were' leaving him (or her) alone until it goes in the henhouse, then it must die.

In the photo below, you can see the hole that the possum has made to enter into the corner of the northwest corner of the barn.  If you zoom in, you can see several of the many piles of possum poo.

What to do?  In the words of a song by The Clash back in the 80's, "Should he stay or should he go?"  If he goes, then our rat problem will rebound, especially with wintertime coming and the snake won't be hunting until it warms up.  If he stays, there will come a time when the rat population is diminished (like it is now) and the possum will shift his prey to one of the laying hens in the hen house.  We can't have that.

So with that decision made, I baited up my cage trap with some Pedigree Dog food.  Possums are the easiest animal to catch.  In two days, I had a big, hissing possum in the cage.

Benjamin was home, so I had him grab his rifle and go put him down and compost him.  We will keep an eye on the rat population in the barn.  Hopefully, in the possum's absence, we won't see a population explosion.  Possums poop on the hay and the animals don't like that on the hay.  I wouldn't either!  However, rats poop and pee on the hay and the animals don't like that either.  It's tough to balance these things out!