Night Time Carnage

It is getting creepy in here. Since we lost our dear old Aussie, we have become over-run with critters. It is almost like Shally had them all held off to the border of our property and as soon as she vacated the premises, they converged upon us in a ravenous stupor. A couple of weeks ago, we were awakened to the sound of cackling chickens in the middle of the night, which is ALWAYS a danger sign with poultry. We jumped out of bed in our t-shirts, slapped on some boots and stormed the chicken pen, shot an opossum with a 22 and this has been the beginning of what I shall call The Great Battle of Marsupials. In the days that followed, we have caught an opossum and a raccoon in the live trap and relocated them to other areas which I am not sure were receptive to "extra animals" but I digress... (By the way, the raccoon was a fluke, I'm not stupid enough to think he is a marsupial) Last night was probably the worst yet. Again, we were alerted to a cackling chicken pen in the dark of night and again slapped on our boots and.... you know the rest. The only twist to this repetition was that Brad eventually gave up the hunt and took his gun back to the house. Almost immediately, I found the marsupial soldier poking his pointy little nose out of the top of the chicken house grinning with his pointy little teeth. Brad returned at this point sans gun and proceeded to beat it to death with a mag lite. Now don't turn me in to PETA people, this was a CHICKEN VS MARSUPIAL situation and someone had to go. I felt it incumbent upon me to delegate the ethical treatment to my chickens in this particular situation. I told Brad that I had no idea he was capable of such carnage. A few minutes after this shindig, we ran a live possum off of the front porch where he was dining on cat food. What next?