Electric Feel

This winter, we started a poultry operation on the farm. After spending the coldest parts of the season re-outfitting the old chicken house and building a mobile egg-laying unit, we received 170 chicks in cardboard boxes in the mail a few months ago. They have quadrupled in size since, and while they are still pullets, they're just about ready to leave the chicken house to enter the fields. We practice pastured livestock management at this farm and so these lucky chickens will follow along behind our 49 cows, entering pastures just as the cow patties are ripe for larvae-picking. We have a tentative move date of Friday, at which point we'll accost the chickens in the dead of night, as peacefully as possible, and move them into our egg mobile. One by one, by the legs.

In preparation, we have set up an electric fence that is intended to look like a rectangle but instead has become some strange geometric shape. Were I expected to find its area on the GREs, I'd skip that question and move on to probability.

That fence is connected to the fence we use for the cattle, which holds up to 9,000 volts of electricity, distributed in timed intervals. If you listen closely, you can sometimes hear the tick of the electricity pulsing through the wires. If you are blessed with flawless timing, you miss the shock wave. Most people have not been so lucky. I can boast that after a full year on this farm, handling these fences, I have yet to be the recipient of a shock, but I have no illusions about finishing this season in the same victorious position.

We have hawks, foxes, coyotes, eagles, owls and many more predators in this valley. As a result, we have purchased all kinds of predator deterrents: from balloons that look like giant, cartoon eyes to laser beams that mimic the glare of an animal at night to the electric fencing and extruded steel floors on the egg mobile itself.

Last year, we all cooed at the fox kits after we located their den, just above the place where the chickens will first be allowed to graze the pastures. This year, we're on a mission to deter those dastardly, adorable creatures so that they won't eat our other, not-so-bright, adorable creatures. It is illegal to kill or trap a fox, but it isn't illegal to scare the shit out of one with an electric fence.

Yesterday, we tied some high-quality locally-made sausages (because that's how we roll) to the fence and left them there overnight, hoping that the predators would approach those sausages and learn the consequences of attempting to eat what's housed inside the fence. Looking at the sausages this morning, twist-tied to the white mesh fence, I half-wished someone had trained me so well to the dangers of smoking.

Then I realized that I've been trained all my life to know better and it hasn't mattered. I plan to talk about my youthful love affair with D.A.R.E at some other time, and about the scare tactics with which the media and my dear friends in medical school still present me. But suffice it to say for now that with the memory of a goldfish, I go back to that proverbial fence over and over, enduring the shock again and again for the instant gratification of consuming what I understand might kill me.

And I pride myself on my intelligence. Go figure.