Where Thieves Break in and Steal

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:  But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:  For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.  Matthew 6:19-21

Laying hens were the first animal that we acquired on our little homestead farm.  I can still remember the joy that our family experienced when the little chicks turned into pullets and at about 24 weeks, they laid their first eggs.  Beautiful brown eggs!  The kids picked them up out of the hay in the nesting boxes and took them inside and Tricia cooked up fresh breakfast.

Ever since, we've been hooked on chickens.  Our fledgling flock grew from just a few to around 60 birds.  Then some started going missing.  We talked about this in earlier posts.  I set traps and caught more possums than you could shake a stick at.  

I believe I posted about catching a raccoon, too.  Once I caught him, I figured that our troubles were over.  They were not.  Tricia would call me and say, "We lost another hen last night."  A few nights would pass and then I'd go out and find this:

I knew we had a battle on our hands.  Look at the spurs on this rooster.  This is a male protector.  He was fighting for his ladies and met a violent end.  The spurs are almost 3 inches long.  He was not a pushover.  If he died fighting, his adversary must be vicious.

The dwindling flock was nervous.  I spotted them huddled up by the side of the garden, mourning the loss of their friends, no doubt.  I had to end these massacres one way or another and help the hens.

It was one night last week when I walked to the barn with my .22 when I came face to face with the cold blooded killer.  I have a hobby of sorts that involves walking out to the hen house and barn with a head lamp and with  my rifle loaded with rat shot, I shoot scurrying rats off the rafters.  I'll shoot 1 or 2 each night.  I went into the hen house on this particular night and saw a brown critter with a fresh killed hen.  We looked at each other and it ran right at me.  I fired.  I know I hit it, but the creature is larger than a rat and the rat shot did not kill it like it kills rats.  The killer escaped.  

The killer was a mink!  Minks have become commonplace around rice fields and crawfish ponds.  They are a sneaky beast, to be sure.  Minks are in the mustelidae family.  These are mammals, including weasel, otters, badgers, and wolverines.  Nasty creatures.  It is no mistake that Scripture defines them as unclean animals:

These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind...  Leviticus 11:29

I figured perhaps the mink was injured and went off into the woods to die.  For a few nights all was well in the hen house.  I worked on patching up all the holes in the henhouse where the mink was getting in.  It was quiet.  Then I determined that we had been in the eye of the hurricane.  The thieving mink dug under the threshold, killed a hen and tried to pull it under.

I set trap after trap, baiting it with the entrails of their most recent kill.  In the morning the traps would be set off, with all the bait gone, but no varmint in the trap.  I had Houdini on my hands.

One night I did catch something, but it was our neighbor's cat.  I sat outside after dark for hours in the quiet night, for four and a half hours one night, two hours the next.  My eyes would get acclimated to the dark.  I watched rats scamper and cats prowling, but no mink in sight.  Perhaps they smelled me?  

I went out the next morning and found that they had moved the pile of rocks at the end of the henhouse and tunneled in, killing and pulling a hen through the hole, leaving a macabre trail of horror in their bloodlust.

I opened the door to the hen house and found a crime scene.  Seven dead birds.  The anger!  The sadness!  We counted up our flock.  We were down to 11 birds.  We started with more than 60!  Everyone around us is experiencing the same thing.  We sold 10 dozen fertilized eggs to a neighbor down the road.  He hatched them out.  They were almost at the age to start laying when the minks killed every last one of them.  

The hen house once full, now echoes with emptiness.  The remaining hens are stressed, nervous and unsure of their future.  They've seen a lot of violence.  If it is possible for birds to have PTSD, I would say they have it.

With a flock of only 11, we devised a plan for safekeeping.  We have a rabbit hutch that is made with hardware cloth.  A mink cannot get through holes that small.  Each night, we catch all the birds and lock them up in the rabbit hutch and release them in the morning.  We've had no losses in over a week.

I did something that I should have done from the start.  I had been praying for God to protect our flock, but I got more specific.  I prayed, "Lord, please kill the mink."  Well, here's the absolute truth.  The very next day, 500 feet from our henhouse on LA 26 that separates a wooded patch behind our house from a rice field, I spotted something in the road.  It was the remnants (I hope) of the mink, victim itself of a violent end.  It's probably not nice of me, but I smiled.  A broad grin, in fact.  This was poetic justice.

I figured that poetic justice just might inspire a poem, so here goes:

There once was a crafty, vile villain,

Who was swift to shed innocent blood,

Our hen's carcasses stacked up like cordwood,

While the mink lie in wait in the mud.

He plotted more killing, more bloodshed,

With delight he ratcheted my ire,

Across Highway 26 his feet ran to do evil once more,

And met a swift end with a tire.

What's the moral of this poem, you may wonder?

What does the story portend?

If you set out to do some violence,

You yourself will meet a violent end.

May there be peace once more in the hen house.  Peace to you, as well