Since my property borders on a lake there have been a couple of instances of my dogs catching and killing water rats. In the beginning they ate the rats and promptly became sick and threw up. Now they have learned just to catch and kill them instead. Not sure if the same scenario would apply to goats and poisonous vegetation.
I expect there are plants native to France which aren't on that American list. Goats are pretty good about knowing which plants to avoid though. The danger seems to be when a bit of land has been over-grazed and they are hungry.
Goats are smarter than cows apparently. Cows will eat stuff that is toxic but I don’t know if it’s because there’s nothing else, or if they are indiscriminate when grazing.
Ah, I think I know this. Cows feed by wrapping their tongue around plants and pulling them up whereas sheep and goats use their teeth to cut them. This gives the sheep and goats more ability to be discerning about what they eat. This is why sheep pasture is best for picking magic mushrooms as they avoid eating fungi but cows can't.
There is no bait that I am aware of anywhere near the lake since it is a protected wildlife area. I don't use any pesticides or herbicides and I use natural table salt for weeds on my driveway. As far as the rats themselves being toxic I would have to research that. We have plenty of snakes in the area and I assume that the rats would be on their menu so I will see what I can find out.
If you notice around the watermelon is mostly grass. I could use a grass killer like Poast to kill the grass. But why? Every bit of the grass is future goat food. These tomatoes were planted in peat moss, sand, spoiled goat hay , and thickly mulched with wood chips. I will p
Apropos horse manure, I used it once. A friend had a stable for their show horses and offered me as much manure as I wanted. That was fine, except that the worms disappeared from the areas where I’d put the horse manure. I hadn’t thought about the drenches and worm medicines given to the horses which would come out in their manure. And which would affect the soil.
When we are threshing the dogs (especially the Labrador) eat all the mice but tend to leave the rats once they've killed them. The ever-hungry Lab' will try to bury them for later if it gets the chance.
Both dogs are rescue mutts so who knows what breeds are in there. The smaller of the two appears to have some terrier and hunting instincts and it is by far the deadlier when it comes to catching rodents.
No, I think it's just because the mice are bite-sized and can be eaten without pausing from the carnage. The dogs really don't like letting any get away. The farm's feral cats and the crows eat the piles of dead rats that are left behind. I suspect that other rats eat their fill of them too. One large stack last year yielded over a hundred rats but the whole pile disappeared overnight.
We were watching a doco the other day. It was about Easter Island and it’s settling by islanders who brought Pacific rats with them as well as chooks for food. They didn’t look like black rats but quite cute little things. I read something about the cannibalistic habits of rats , during this plague with the decrease in city food supplies. Closed restaurants, etc.
Rats are frikkin nasty. We have the common Brown rat here and they will eat a dead rat caught in trap. I get the heeby geebys just looking at a rat. But I am the guy that baits and checks the traps. We don't want any lost dead rats so we use rat traps. And a cat.
One of my juggler mates being interviewed about Glastonbury. Some good satirical rants from Jonathon Pie.
Is the common cold we suffer now, the same as the common cold suffered 100 years ago? People in books always sounded sicker than we do when we have a cold. I heard a discussion about the C19 virus and how it will evolve. A theory is that the stronger strains of the virus will die out as a result of killing off its’ hosts and the weaker strains will continue to infect people who won’t die. So, could the common cold of one hundred years ago have been more deadly than the current one?
Alternatively people today are HEALTHIER than they were 100 years ago and therefore the Common Cold has a smaller impact on our health. The same principle applies to us as it does to the cold virus. Those who were susceptible were killed off while those who were healthier survived.
This is an excerpt from an article about the myxomatosis virus- used to kill rabbits in big numbers. Only one example and I don’t know if all viruses behave like this. “Let’s start with the virus. It’s impossible to tell if a pathogen is getting more or less nasty by simply looking for changes in death rates: lots of things can contribute to a change in apparent virulence. Most obviously, hosts can acquire immunity or develop resistance, and so reduce disease severity without any genetic change in the pathogen. The only way to know for sure if a pathogen is evolving to be more or less nasty is to make comparisons in what is called a common garden, a standard setting that does not change. Fenner realized this immediately, and he soon began comparing the lethality of viruses isolated from the field in laboratory rabbits of the same species.4 (See illustration here.) The work showed that the almost invariably lethal progenitor virus strain was replaced within a few years by strains with case fatality rates of 70 percent to 95 percent. Some field isolates killed fewer than half the lab rabbits. Over the next few decades, things settled down, and strains at both ends of the lethality spectrum become increasingly difficult to find. Fenner showed why. The highly lethal progenitor virus killed rabbits so fast that its infectious period was shorter than that of the less lethal viral mutants. That meant that the less lethal strains were able to infect more new victims and spread throughout the population. Natural selection thus favored reductions in virulence. But it did not favor substantial reductions. Benign strains, it turned out, were also less infectious, this time because host immunity was able to control and clear them more rapidly. This work—the time series of isolates tested in a common garden and the experimental dissection of the relationship between virulence and transmission—made MYXV the poster child of virulence evolution: a highly lethal pathogen became less lethal over time. But it was still pretty nasty. It had not become benign.” https://www.the-scientist.com/featu...irulence-as-hosts-become-more-resistant-30219