Moving a young raccoon

[Hay Dude]

I get up close to raccoons all the time, you know to pick them up with a shovel to throw them in the end loader bucket.

That is very risky to your health. I was bitten by a wild animal and got rabies shots by advice of the PA Game commission.
Not fun to go through.

I would never suggest having only the length of a shovel between you and a possibly rabid wild animal. That thing could jump on you and bite your ass in a country second.

 

[WinterDeere]

An older friend of mine walked in on a groundhog in his shed one day, when going to fetch his Ford tractor. This thing had been digging up his shed floor for weeks, so he was so thrilled to catch it in the act that he quick grabbed a long handled 4-tine pitch fork off the wall hook, and ran the animal through with it.

Trouble was, he didn't manage to hit anything vital, apparently just fat and skin. So now this poor 75 year old man is standing in his shed, no one around and no cell phone handy, with a pi$$ed-off and somewhat large groundhog stuck on the other end of the fork. Nothing in reach to finish the job he'd started, and no easy way to let up on the thing long enough to grab something.

I forget how the story ended, we were all probably laughing too hard to even hear the end of it, but he managed to outlive the groundhog.

 

[Dftodd]

Plus... he burned up a perfectly good hat!

I throw all of our dead chickens, ground hogs, and other animals onto our burn pile, with the intent of burning them. But it's never actually come to that, they're always gone by the next day, before I've had a chance to build and light a fire. I've never seen who's carrying them off, but we have Turkey buzzards the size of Volkswagons, so they're my first suspect.

Buzzards will clean up road kill pretty fast around here. Run over a snake in the morning and its gone by the afternoon.

Same with possums, and coons.

 

[Dftodd]

At the old farm I had a local chicken farmer bring 150-200 tons of manure several times a year.
Late one summer it was very hot, 90s everyday, and he started trucking.
The manure was full of dead chickens that had succumbed to the heat. I thought this is going to smell double strong.
Wrong.
The coyotes and other scavengers must have been walking around burping and farting they were so stuffed with chicken.
Well... unless the Colonel snuck by at night.
The chickens buried in the pile were totally decomposed by spring when I spread it out.

Coyotes dont stick around my property. Closest I've seen one was a mile up the road.

Coyotes were messing with the cattle across the road.

The ranchers buddy who lives on the south side of the field, has a rifle outfitted with night vision scope.

He went out there and thinned the pack down one night. The few that escaped, won't go anywhere near that pasture.

There are a few other cattle ranchers in the area, plus hobby farmers, so i'm sure they've done some thinning themselves.

 

[MossRoad]

Our whole family had to go through rabies shots several years ago due to bats and an unvaccinated kitten. Theses days rabies shots themselves are not bad at all. Just like a flu shot in the arm. 4-5 of them spaced out over days, according to your local health department protocol.

What smarts is the Human immune globulin shots. If you're bitten, they give them around the bite wound. If you've not been bitten and just suspected of being exposed, they give them to you in your thighs and buttocks.

It's a thick med, so big needle. And, the dose is based on body weight. So big guy gets big dose = them squeezing that syrup into our muscles through a needle that looks like a turkey baster!

To speed it up and shorten the pain, they had two people stab you in each thigh at the same time. After you said ouch!, they'd flip you over and stab you in both cheeks at the same time. Then they'd sit you in a chair for 1/2 hour to observe you. I preferred to stand!

 

[MossRoad]

Years ago, our neighbor's yellow lab ran out their back door, saw a groundhog in the yard, ran over and, wanting to play, whacked it in the head with its paw. The groundhog fell over dead. The dog and the neighbor were both perplexed.

 

[bigtiller]

Our whole family had to go through rabies shots several years ago due to bats and an unvaccinated kitten. Theses days rabies shots themselves are not bad at all. Just like a flu shot in the arm. 4-5 of them spaced out over days, according to your local health department protocol.

What smarts is the Human immune globulin shots. If you're bitten, they give them around the bite wound. If you've not been bitten and just suspected of being exposed, they give them to you in your thighs and buttocks.

It's a thick med, so big needle. And, the dose is based on body weight. So big guy gets big dose = them squeezing that syrup into our muscles through a needle that looks like a turkey baster!

To speed it up and shorten the pain, they had two people stab you in each thigh at the same time. After you said ouch!, they'd flip you over and stab you in both cheeks at the same time. Then they'd sit you in a chair for 1/2 hour to observe you. I preferred to stand!

Ouch !!

 

[MossRoad]

Ouch !!

Not so bad, really. Just a big YIKES! when they jabbed us. The kids and wife handled it better than I did, but I'm twice their weight. Yeah, that's the reason.

I used to be friends with a Catholic Priest that grew up on a farm in Wisconsin. Big old farm boy. He was out shoveling manure or something and felt something scratching his leg. He thought it might have been a mouse running up his pant leg. Brushed at it, but it continued. So he whacked his leg pretty hard and out fell a dead bat. It had chewed up his leg and blood was present. Sooooo, off to the Dr. Bat tested positive for rabies. He said he had to get something like 15 shots around his belly button and it was painful! The skin all turned black in the area and he made a big circle with his two hands and placed it on his belly. He said that was not fun. He shared that story with me when he found out our family was going through it. Good guy. He passed away several years ago. I miss talking to him.

Things have progressed since then, thank goodness.

 

[WinterDeere]

Buzzards will clean up road kill pretty fast around here. Run over a snake in the morning and its gone by the afternoon.

You just reminded me of one Saturday when I passed a freshly-killed deer on the shoulder of the road, driving out the road to our marina, on my way to do some racing. There were two large turkey buzzards on the thing already, and passing on it on my way back home four or five hours later, the thing is already stripped to a skeleton.

Those also like to sit atop sailboat masts, which creates two problems, due to the size of the birds:

1. You'll arrive at the lake on a Saturday morning, and wonder who's dog shat all over your boat cover. Their turds don't look like they could even come from a bird!

2. They're big enough that they break parts on top of some of the smaller masts.

 

[Jstpssng]

I would never suggest having only the length of a shovel between you and a possibly rabid wild animal. That thing could jump on you and bite your ass in a country second.

By the time he gets that close, I doubt they are biting anything.
Although one of the nice things about having the grapple on is that you can forgo the shovel.

 

[dodge man]

That is very risky to your health. I was bitten by a wild animal and got rabies shots by advice of the PA Game commission.
Not fun to go through.

I would never suggest having only the length of a shovel between you and a possibly rabid wild animal. That thing could jump on you and bite your ass in a country second.

There not alive when I pick them up with a shovel, they have been properly ventilated. If I got rabies shots for every dead animal I picked up I’d be getting them 10 times a year or more.

 

[ponytug]

There not alive when I pick them up with a shovel, they have been properly ventilated. If I got rabies shots for every dead animal I picked up I’d be getting them 10 times a year or more.

Ok, not an MD here, but I did live for a time in an area with packs of feral dogs, some of which became rabid on a fairly regular basis. Scary. The employees were all vaccinated against rabies to slow the spread of the virus, and give us time to get the full treatment. One of the employees in another area, where there weren't rabies vaccination requirements, played with a small puppy and got bitten on the web of her hand, between her thumb and forefinger. She succumbed to rabies from the small bite that she ignored fairly rapidly.

Based on that experience, if you are around potentially rabid carcasses that often, if it were me, I'd have a conversation with your doctor about being preemptively vaccinated against rabies. It is a much smaller shot, and boosts your chances of survival.

Our vet (!) recommended vaccinating all of our horses against rabies when we moved out into the boonies because apparently horses can pick up rabies from grazing contaminated grass/forage. He pointed out to us that we were likely going to stick our hands in the drooling horse's mouth to check for foreign objects, thereby potentially giving us a massive dose of rabies. We vaccinated the ponies pronto.

All the best,

Peter

 

[MossRoad]

That's the thing about rabies... you contract it through the blood or saliva of an infected animal. It has to enter you through an open wound or mucous membrane like eyes, nose, mouth. The chance of catching it are pretty small. However, it's statistically fatal 100% of the time in humans. The number of human survivors is few and far between. Plus, the incubation period in a human can vary from days to many months.

When we had our bat/kitten incident, if it would have just been my wife and me, we probably would have done nothing. However, our kids were involved. I'm not going to take even the remotest chance with our kids, so off to the doctor we went.

This poor woman died about 5-6 weeks after being bitten.

California teacher dies from rabies month after being bitten by bat in her classroom

Leah Seneng, 61, carried the winged mammal out of her classroom and released it, not knowing she had been bitten and fatally infected.

www.nbcnews.com

 

[Sigarms]

That's just it, rabies is not air born.

Disposing of a dead animal as long as you don't touch it, you won't have a problem.

Should be buried deep. Since I don't have a back hoe, last one was 3.5' deep (and that was a workout) and body was double bagged.

Per the woman who died on the bat bite, sad, but preventable. NEVER touch a strange wild animal. That woman thinking she was just scratched by the bat gave her her own death sentence from not seeking treatment right away.

 

[Dftodd]

That's just it, rabies is not air born.

Disposing of a dead animal as long as you don't touch it, you won't have a problem.

Should be buried deep. Since I don't have a back hoe, last one was 3.5' deep (and that was a workout) and body was double bagged.

Per the woman who died on the bat bite, sad, but preventable. NEVER touch a strange wild animal. That woman thinking she was just scratched by the bat gave her her own death sentence from not seeking treatment right away.

I think I would be digging a hole as deep as I could with the loader bucket of my tractor.

 

[Sigarms]

I think I would be digging a hole as deep as I could with the loader bucket of my tractor.

So would I if I could afford one

 

[Dftodd]

So would I if I could afford one

Your on a tractor site, so i figured you had a tractor with a loader My bad for assuming

I should have checked your profile

I got a very specific threat from my wife.

She has it all planned out how she can hide my body and get away with it using the tractorz some dead animals and the back 40 of our property

 

[ponytug]

Your on a tractor site, so i figured you had a tractor with a loader My bad for assuming

I should have checked your profile

I got a very specific threat from my wife.

She has it all planned out how she can hide my body and get away with it using the tractorz some dead animals and the back 40 of our property

Wow! That's pretty specific and detailed planning on someone's part.

I'd be watching my step and sleeping with one eye open.

All the best,

Peter

 

[Sigarms]

Your on a tractor site, so i figured you had a tractor with a loader My bad for assuming

I should have checked your profile

I got a very specific threat from my wife.

She has it all planned out how she can hide my body and get away with it using the tractorz some dead animals and the back 40 of our property

No worries LOL

Only thing I never paid cash for was our home when we bought it 20 years ago, and now it's paid off.

When we bought the place, I knew nothing about tractors which is why I came here.

What I found out is when I went to auctions, even back around 2005, pricing for used old tractors seemed stupid. I could not justify the out of pocket expense of what a new tractor would run me to the misses for the size I thought I would need (like a gun safe, bigger is always better LOL). Locally, even back then, there didn't see to be many used tractors for sale that justified the price vs buying new IMO.

That said, good thing I did come here. I got to meet John Thomas in person, he gave me a test drive on his F series Kubota, price wasn't bad at the time IMO for under 150 hours on it, so I bought it.

Picked up some spare parts at the local Kubota dealer a couple of months ago. He had a F mower sitting in his showroom. Feel over dead when I saw the price. More than double than any used vehicle we've ever bought.

In hindsight (perfect science) after 20 years living here, should have financed a tractor and got what I wanted. Now, being empty nesters, we're getting ready to downsize because the house and property is too big for us. Life sure is funny...

 

[Dftodd]

No worries LOL

Only thing I never paid cash for was our home when we bought it 20 years ago, and now it's paid off.

When we bought the place, I knew nothing about tractors which is why I came here.

What I found out is when I went to auctions, even back around 2005, pricing for used old tractors seemed stupid. I could not justify the out of pocket expense of what a new tractor would run me to the misses for the size I thought I would need (like a gun safe, bigger is always better LOL). Locally, even back then, there didn't see to be many used tractors for sale that justified the price vs buying new IMO.

That said, good thing I did come here. I got to meet John Thomas in person, he gave me a test drive on his F series Kubota, price wasn't bad at the time IMO for under 150 hours on it, so I bought it.

Picked up some spare parts at the local Kubota dealer a couple of months ago. He had a F mower sitting in his showroom. Feel over dead when I saw the price. More than double than any used vehicle we've ever bought.

In hindsight (perfect science) after 20 years living here, should have financed a tractor and got what I wanted. Now, being empty nesters, we're getting ready to downsize because the house and property is too big for us. Life sure is funny...

Wife and I went the opposite direction. Downsizing the house and up sized the property now that we are empty nesters.

Looking to build an 2 bed, 2 bath handicapped accessible home, shop, chicken and hog pens. And rotate a couple cows out there in the back acreage for food. Plus a garden and green house

We're planning to raise our meat, and what ever veggies we can grow. And die in the house