two days off...

packed full again.
feed runs, errands, new dog coming in (maybe)...a potential adoption meet and greet..plus my personal stuff.

i got off early from work yesterday afternoon...i literally felt like i had been run over by a truck and advil just wasn't doing the trick to get me moving very well. so i whipped thru my clients, worked thru my lunch and came home early to take some heavier duty drugs..i think i feel a bit better today?

thank to all of the weekend warriors for all of their help this weekend...everything looked and felt great.

jesse is up and down..better on saturday not so great on sunday. part of the issue is he really is a highly strung and very sensitive dog so not being physically right is messing up his head.

i do appreciate everyone suffering with me over the rat problem here. misery likes company..at least i do!
just to be clear tho on the options available and already explored. snap and sticky traps are not an option as too many rats are left to suffer for too long, stuck in goo or with their tails, feet or noses snapped shut in a trap. trap and release is not an option because rats have a travelling distance capability of up to 12 miles and i don't know of anywhere around here not within 12 miles of someones house. plus just dumping farm rats off into the bush somewhere where they don't have access to food, probably isn't a great solution for them to have to deal with either. loose cats on our property is not an option..between dogs and coyotes the cats would be at huge risk. plus the cats are still killing them, it just keeps my hands and soul a bit cleaner. we do have one of the electric pulse sending rodent expellers but on the rat expelling frequency, it is extremely noisy and REALLY irritating to both the other animals and me. there are birth control options being tested in various labs but they are not available for purchase to the public yet. the electocution traps might be an option we could try but i am not sure on the safety for our other animals if they get at it and i am not wholly convinced that electrocution is all that humane either.

at this point the only two options i see as working for this is...either periodically doing population control with poison or getting rid of the barn yard birds altogether and refusing to rescue more. either way...birds die because there is no where to go or rats die because they are breeding here.

and i am not too fond of either option.

i get that most of you are uncomfortable with this aspect of rescue...the conflicts of interests that make rescuers do terrible things. i am really uncomfortable with it too. but sadly..it is a reality of rescuing multi-species farm animals here.
if i do nothing...due to health and safety...we will eventually be shut down because the rodent numbers will soon overwhelm us. if i start dumping them somewhere else, we will be passing on the problem and piss off someone else and that too could shut us down. if i am going tohve to kill them, i want it to be as non violent as possible.i have to say that working for years with human palliative cancer patients who also do sometimes bleed out..it is probably one of the least painful and distessing ways to go out...but it does take awhile...and that is hard for us to watch...the getting weaker, more vulnerable and disoriented and not comprehending, what is happening to them now.

this truly is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't...the entire situation, every which way you look at it... sucks.

but bottom line...too many rats here pose a threat to our animals and to saints as a whole. and that means my job is to minimize the risks to all of us.
welcome to the world of rescue where it isn't all warm and fuzzy and where you can't always find a way to be the good person you really want to be...sometimes you just have to do things you know aren't right. and that is a horrible feeling.