Coon Dog!

Note:  If you are against hunting, killing predators to protect your chickens or seeing pictures of dead animals, do not read this post!  Thanks!


Some of you may remember that we originally got Jackal as a companion for Storm, but we chose a Beagle/Mountain Cur cross because we wanted a squirrel dog.  Jackal's dad was an awesome squirrel dog!!  Sadly Jackal just doesn't seem interested in squirrels!  He's much more interested in chasing rabbits and protecting the property from opossums and raccoons. 

For those of you who continued reading although you're not too thrilled about the idea of killing predators, it is not against the law here and it's sort of necessary because of overpopulation problems.  About the only thing out there to kill the coons and possums are coyotes and we're too close to the city for them to really come around too much, so we have tons of possums and coons (and skunks, they are all over the road lately and they have tested positive for rabies too).  There's also been a SCARY number of positive rabies cases in the coons and our neighbor has a horse that contracted EPM from the possums, so both of them are on my number one enemy list.  That's besides the fact that they are stealing my eggs and killing my chickens. 

So anyway, I went out to feed the horses after dark and Jackal was on the back deck watching me.  Suddenly he started doing his predatory bark and I knew there was something out there.  A lot of times it's a false alarm (our cat) and sometimes it's deer, but not this time!!  My husband was shining the flashlight around looking, but couldn't find what he was barking at so I let Jackal out of the dog yard.  He bolted down into the back yard and started throwing himself at the chicken house.  Jackal is only nineteen inches tall, but I swear he was jumping three or four feet high up against the sides of that chicken house.  I let him into the chicken yard and he started circling the chicken house, still jumping up against it and barking like mad.

My husband finally spotted the raccoon hiding up in the tree right above the chicken house (so now we know how they are getting in the pen which has six foot fences!).  So my husband took care of it and below is a picture if you want to see how big it was.  Don't worry there's no blood in the picture.  :)


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My big giant clown foot is in the picture to show you size.  I feel bad for killing the coon because I love coons.  They are so adorable!  I can't have them killing my chickens or my brother in laws chickens (we're taking them to him soon, he lives out of state) though, so we did what we had to do. 

So anyway, even though I'm sad about the coon dying I was so proud of Jackal for treeing his first coon!  I have no interest in coon hunting at all though so I do really wish he would tree squirrels lol, but it came in handy for protecting our chickens.  I would have been a lot more upset to lose one of them. 

To see Chrome's reaction to the raccoon check out his blog http://rdxhorses.blogspot.com!