The Feast and the BIG Dog

Everyday when I get up I look outside to see what the day is like weather wise.  Today when I looked I see something laying in the yard near the road.  This is never a good thing.  It's usually is a white tail fawn that didn't get out of the road fast enough for those idiots that think the roads here are a race track.  Before I can confirm what it is two Ravens land on it and and start doing what they do.  They fly off and a turkey vulture (buzzard) lands on it.  A doe is crossing the road and proceeds to chase off the buzzard.  Sorry Mom, you baby didn't make it.  All of  this before 7:00 AM.  Now, at 9:15 AM there are no less than 20 buzzards cleaning up the mess.  It will most likely all be gone by this evening.  At least I won't have to haul it off.  I have to find away to block our windows so Snickers isn't barking all day at the buzzards in his yard.

This is one of the things that we see every so often out here.  We have a lot of wild life, especially deer.  It's not unusual to see 20 or more in the yard either laying down or eating my grass.  So consequently we get to see nature at work, even the gory stuff.  It freaks out all the newbie city folks that have moved out here.  Apparently they have no idea how nature works from what I read on the neighborhood app and FB groups.  It's really sad how ignorant people really are.  The comments are generally as dumb as the original posts. 

Part of the problem is that these folks feed the deer and it keeps them around populated areas.  I get it.  The are beautiful animals.  Fun to watch.  But we are overpopulated with them.  Feeding them only hurts them, they lose their fear of us to their detriment.  There is no real predation here in our neighborhood except for an occasional loose dog killing one.  There are bobcats but they are too small to take on a deer, maybe a fawn.  There has also been sightings and photos of a Mountain Lion roaming around.  But that's not enough to thin the herd.  So the herd gets bigger and bigger and becomes a problem.  In the fall my front yard smells like a sewer at times due to all the deer waste.  There is no real solution since this area/neighborhood encompasses well over a thousand acres. It could easily be triple that, I just don't know.

I am usually out on my morning walk with the dog before sun up trying to beat the heat and humidity.  Snickers loves it.  Most days it goes very well and he is learning not to lunge and bark at every dog that we meet along the way.  But there are just some dogs that he just knows he has to protect me from or show them that he is the boss and owns that street.  The bigger the dog the more he goes nuts.  This is a dog that weighs in at 16 lbs. with very short legs.  The other dog walkers sometimes laugh at his antics.  But evidently he doesn't know or care that he isn't a big dog.  There were two today he just knew he needed to either kill them or poop down their neck so they would know who's boss.  When we finally get past them, he is so proud of himself that he saved my old butt that he prances and smiles up at me making sure I know he is a good boy for doing his job.  It makes me laugh even though I had been pretty unhappy with him prior.  Still more work needs to be done to socialize him better.  There is a happy medium somewhere between doing his job and not going nuts.  This may take longer than I want.  

Happy Trails