Living in the hills has giving me the opportunity to learn about both animals and plant’s. I have a QE11 covenant on a block that has been teaching me how plants grow with minimal grazing. The only grazing this block gets is from the wild animals. The difference between the plants and the animals is like the difference between a flower garden and a vegetable garden and we all know that we can survive longer eating vegetables than flowers.Maintenance of both gardens requires planing and work for the best results. To get the best out of a fruit tree it needs to be pruned a grape vine gets cut right back every year for the best results and we all know that the 1st time we mow our lawns in the spring the grass grows twice as fast. Now with my QE11 covenant block it would be too much work to prune each tree back so it makes sense to utilise the skills of an animal. Beside the QE11 block is my orchard with all types of fruit and nut trees and at a certain time of the month the possums can’t help themselves but head for new food. If they do well they can even make it up to the house to these gardens. The downside for the possums is Jeff the dog. Jeff sleeps outside in the shed and his job is catching possums, his best day so far was 33 possums but that was not at home. For me there is the inconvenience of having to go outside in the middle of the night to shoot the possum that Jeff has bailed in a tree. When I compare this to the work that I do with my sheep that I have had to build fences to keep them in and drench and delice them and shear them, there is a lot more work goes into the sheep. A sheep takes me about 5 minutes to shear but I can pluck a possum in 1 minute. Now for the results the white sheep’s wool is only worth $1.60 per kilo the black sheeps wool is only worth 90 cents per kilo yet the possum fur is worth $115 per kilo so this year when I took in my years wool and 2 months worth of possum fur I got more for the possum fur than for wool.
What really saddens me is the way some people treat our animals in the wild and somehow justify what they are doing as being acceptable. I would not poison my vegetable garden because of one weed. Back in the 1950 deer were treated as a pest and shoot in big numbers and the only part of them taken out was the tail as a token for payment. When the first farmer put deer behind a wire people thought he was mad then along came the choppers and almost wiped out the wild deer population.
The way on which we are currently treating our wild animals is disgraceful and we can only hope that the people in power (Germans) wake up to the fact of how they are treating our animals (Jews). We humans are the worst animals on the planet for our disregard for others. We only now what we learn and when we are living in one environment and trying to tell someone who lives in another environment how to think and act without understanding that environment we are always going to have trouble.
Here is an example that cracks me up the way a person in town has to pick up there dog shit. My dogs have a 5 acre paddock and there is not many days that they don’t go out for a walk.