Tightwad's Goat Hay Rack

How cheap am I?

Apparently, cheap enough, and mouthy enough about it, that there is now a snarky betting pool based on my skinflint evangelism.

A colleague once credited me with imbuing her with the ethic "Never spend more than a buck for a dog toy." Which is not exactly accurate. We've got a couple of nineteen-year-old Kong toys rolling around here. Something that durable and dog-popular is well worth six or ten bucks.

And the farm itself fulfills all the in jokes among stockdog folk about quarter-million-dollar dog toys.

But seriously, I'm going to spend north of $20 for one of these --



When the world is already littered with these


for the sum of $0?

And when it's played, I can toss it in the recycling bin having already accomplished the "re-use" portion of the three R's.

We do a lot of re-using around the farm. The junk and discards of previous owners have outlived their tenancies. Half of getting any repair or improvement done around here is remembering where I saw that perfect-sized board or strange metal bracket or honk of chain.

The hens pay their rent in a rusty but still serviceable 8-hole galvanized nest box that I found behind the pole barn when we moved in. Savings over $100 right there. The sheet metal from the defunct above-ground pool is being portioned off as roofing for animal housing, while the pool cover makes a dandy woodpile tarp and the steel side braces are the perfect size for meat bird feed troughs when outfitted with end caps/legs made from the sound bits of roofing that we cut off with the rotted parts from the barn last fall.

One leftover that I've found rather unsatisfactory is the hay rack in the goats' barn stall. It was designed for horses, and allows the persnickety goats to waste a lot of hay. And it's not really big enough for our current caprine population of six.

Anyway, the herd is summering in the northeast pasture, well away from the barn. They have a portion of the woodshed for shelter, and I've commandeered another section as an open-air milking shed, adding some wire shelves (one recycled, one liberated from a failed video store's dumpster) and a sturdy closed cupboard, bought for about six bucks at the coolest store ever.

The milking stand, which appears quite ancient, served the last owners as the step-in platform for the defunct above-ground pool. Before it was that, it was ... a milking stand. I had to improvise a new headstall for it, but there was plenty of scrap plywood from our barn roof renovations.

The goats now needed a hayrack for their portion of the shed.

So I looked online for plans for a home-made hay rack, and didn't find anything that appealed. Most of the plans seemed excessively fussy. I really don't expect the hay rack to function, say, 5,000 feet below the ocean surface. Dovetailed joints are nice in a dresser drawer, but really I was just hoping it would be sturdy, resist goat abuse, and minimize gratuitous hay waste. (Goats like to cherry-pick their roughage, and are afraid that once the hay touches the ground, it is rendered inedible.)

So I went out and wandered around the woodshed, pole barn, and both levels of the real barn. Also behind the pole barn and in the basement. Looking for materials that might say "hayrack" to me.

Came up with a small section of semi-rigid welded-wire cattle panel left over from construction of the foster kennel last year. A selection of scrap 2x4. And some paneling scraps apparently left over from the construction of the pole barn itself.

Actually, there was a lot of other junk to choose from, but this is the stuff that made the final cut.

Here's the finished rack, installed in the woodshed:



Note that the horizontal wire spacing is much closer on the edge of the panel that I have placed downward in the finished rack. This is perfect for hay conservation. Hog panel, with its small square openings, would also have worked very well for the face of the rack.

The cut piece of panel had 8" lengths of the horizontal cross-wires on both ends. This was perfect for my plan to over-engineer the beast for enhanced goat-resistance. I started by taking two lengths of 2x4 that were a little longer than the cattle panel was high. I lined up each 2x4 with the jabby ends, marked where each wire lined up, and drilled what, eleven holes along the midline of each 2x4, corresponding to each wire end.

Then I jammed and whacked and cajoled each 2x4 onto the cattle panel.

I leaned the panel with its stabilizing wooden ends against the wall of the barn until the angle looked about right to me. Measured the height and the depth at the top end.

Cut the appropriately-sized rectangle out of the soundest part of the scrap paneling, then cut it into two triangles, corner to corner.

Marked the location of each pokey horizontal wire on the hypotenuse of each triangular panel, and drilled holes. Jammed and whacked and cajoled each end panel onto the cattle panel. I also reinforced the longer leg of one triangle with a length of scrap because the panel was chipping there.

Then I hammered the the living crap out of the cross wires so they flattened out to hold the end panels and the structural 2x4's onto the cattle panel


Trimmed the squared-off bottom ends of the 2x4's to follow the angle of the end panels.

Trimmed two 2x4's and screwed them on to the hypotenuse 2x4's as structural components of the top, the short leg of the right triangle.

Grabbed two more scrap ends of 2x4 and carted the whole assembly over to the woodshed.

Eyeballed how high I wanted the rack. Goats like to eat "up," and they will squander more hay if the rack is low, so I mounted it pretty high. (Note: Don't do this if you have goats or sheep with horns. That's a good way to hang an animal and kill it. In fact, if your stock has horns, don't use a rack design that has horizontal elements at all -- use vertical slats positioned such that your shortest horned animal could stand flat-footed with its head caught in the rack. And buy a disbudding tool, seriously.) I screwed one of the 2x4's onto the wall where I wanted the bottom of the rack, leveled it, and added more screws. This made it possible to mount the rather heavy rack without help -- just rested the bottom of the wire on the 2x4 and propped a shepherd's crook to hold the rack against the wall.

Screwed the rack on with deck brackets at the top, angled 3" screws at the bottom.

I added the second piece of scrap about 8" below the bottom of the feeder, so the kids would have something solid to brace on when they stand up to feed.




Purchased parts for this project -- approximately 20 screws and two right-angle brackets. Maybe $1.00 worth of hardware. It was all stuff I had in the workshop already, but not recycled or repurposed.

Construction time about 90 minutes. Took me longer to take the pictures, download them, and write this.

Retail cost of a commercially-made large, abuse-resistant, wall-mounted hay rack designed to prevent petulant goats from indulging in hay tantrums?

I dunno. I could find no such animal for sale.

Macro Monday: Lunch Break

This hornet flew in and took a lunch break on the cherry tree while I was hanging laundry.

PC insists he is not a yellowjacket. Says you can tell because he is working for a living.

Photo Phriday: Poncho

The weather this year seems to be encouraging the burdock to an unreasonable degree.

Or someone spilled some of this stuff here.

Cole could use a poncho. Unlike the other ES's coats, his is highly absorbent. Nickname: Sponge Dog Square Pants.

Dog Power

Soon after Mr. Ziegler bought the Harmony property*, Isaac Wilson, a Quaker, engaged in the manufacture of salt near the creek in the village. The business was principally conducted by David and Webster Wilson, sons of "Quaker" Wilson. They also had a similar manufactory on Yellow Creek in Lancaster Township. The well was bored by means of ox-power, and for drills, poles fastened together were used, the lower pole being pointed with iron. The well was about four hundred and fifty feet deep. For pumping, dogs were pressed into service in a "dog power." Six or eight dogs were kept. Sometimes they chased each other in the "power," then the machinery would move rapidly for a few minutes. The dogs were fed large quantities of mush. The business was not very profitable, as only about four barrels of salt per day could be produced. Salt being $1.75 per barrel, and, as hundreds of bushels of coal were consumed daily, this cost taken with the expense of a man and a boy and several dogs, left but a small margin for profits.

History of Butler County, Pennsylvania
1883, Chicago, Waterman, Watkins & Co.

______

* ca 1872

Sioux City, IA: Still Vicious

Devoted wolf cubs will recall the clown car called Sioux City Council that kept reappearing on this blog and all over teh interwebz last summer to disgorge more hilarity just when you thought it had to be empty.

Ordinarily, a third-rate town's fourth-rate politicians and their Solonesque approach to public safety via canine racial profiling doesn't bear a special look here. Too damn many of 'em. But here, Alannis, here is some irony.

After pibble-hating councilman and cynological sage Aaron Rochester's untrained, unfenced, unsupervised, let us safely say asshole of a Labrador, bit an innocent passerby, Mr. Rochester continued to insist that the breed ban ordinance that he authored was Jesus' own animal control law.

The dog was impounded under the "one strike and you're dead" ordinance that was also thoughtfully penned by the august member of council who speculated that his own resident biter was "protecting the children." Oh woe, it seemed that Jake Manyteeth was about to be hoisted by his own(er's) petard.

But wait! What light from yonder window breaks? Jake's life is spared by a deus ex machina that is totally a surprise to his devoted master guy who sold the dog to another guy while he was impounded on death row.

Yes, Aaron Rochester claims he "sold" his death-row biting dog to someone named Lew Weinberg on July 31. On August 2, the yeller thumb-slasher was stolen from animal control during a Sunday night break-in. Rochester somehow failed to mention ("Oh, by the way...") the dog's in absentia change of master at a city council meeting on August 3. Cuz that's just how he rolls.

Over the past year, the Googles has sent me occasional updates on this devoted Iowa public servant, slayer of porch sofas* and nemesis of Girls Gone Wild buses that are clearly obscene and illegal -- a man never too busy to make light of his own starring role in multiple crimes against persons and property by, say, judging a "Jake look-alike contest" to see which Labrador most resembled that biting dog he used to own but doesn't anymore and he doesn't know anything about it, no sir.

If anyone had the brass balls to bring a nice buckskin pibble and sit it down in front of Rochester, it is not recorded.

There were also news briefs indicating that Sioux City was on the verge of repealing its obviously bogus breed ban in deference to the advice of all experts and their own legal counsel, and revising its overall vicious dog ordinance to ensure that politicians could always weasel their way out of the consequences of their negligent dog ownership things would be more fair to good dogs.

Well don't get your hopes up.

Pit bulls will remain banned in Sioux City after a 3-2 vote Monday by the City Council, but the panel gave first-round approval to some changes in the vicious-animal law.
...

Radig and Rochester argued the ban, in place since 2008 when Rochester first proposed it, was working. Hobart had voted for the ban but has since said he no longer favored it. Padgett and Fitch previously had indicated they did not like breed bans.

"I'm not going to change what the previous council did," Fitch, who took office Jan. 2, said after the meeting, "I think if we made the change those owners would get confused on what they are supposed to do."

In refusing to lift the pit bull ban, the council also did not toughen the irresponsible-pet-owner provision, as proposed by City Attorney Andrew Mai. Council members said they believed the current law could be enforced.

...

Under the proposed new law, pet owners could reclaim their pets from Animal Control during an appeals process.

Looks like the councilman got his way.

Now it will be dead-easy to disappear a genuinely vicious dog while "appealing" -- no bolt cutters required, no pesky exposure to felony burglary charges.

The new guy on the council pussied out like a little bitch thoughtfully supported the wise judgment of his predecessors so that they could avoid confusing the little people by not, you know, confiscating and killing their pets.

Counsel's advice to council was ignored, 'cuz what does the city attorney know about the law anyway?

And all the "pit bulls" who never bit anyone are still vicious.

_________
* Mebbe if Rochester had a comfy couch on his front porch, the damn dog would have stayed put instead of charging down the steps and across the lawn to attempt four-fanged pollexectomy.

Much mischief can be prevented with a suitably comfy couch.

46 Hours

Blue track is PC's, recorded on Saturday night. Red track is mine. East pointing black arrow designates the start, three-pointed star the end (barn). The blue blob is a dead-end where PC got bunged up in deadfall. You can see that we successfully bypassed this false lead, but had difficulties near it. (Dog was closer to being spot-on than I was -- the track reflects the route I managed to find through the obstruction.) The long slight divergence as we return west reflects poor GPS reception because it had fallen to the underside of my butt pack, and the abrupt "return" to putting it back where it belonged.

At SAR dog training on Saturday, Perfesser Chaos employed the full powers of his well-honed husbandly listening skills, and thereby screwed up the opportunity to provide Rosie with an aged training trail in a time-efficient way.

I was, of course, charmingly understanding* about this, and sweetly informed him that he would be laying a trail for her when we got home, to be run on Sunday morning. About a fourteen-hour aged trail -- nice scent challenge. He had some things he wanted to reconnoiter out in our woods, so off he went, whistling merrily without a complaint, as soon as we got back.

He laid a roughly oval-ish trail about a kilometer long, starting in the lush meadow next to our spring, going northeast through the steep woods on the near side of the buttcrack, crossing the stream near our neighbor's property line, angling back SSE, then taking a turn onto our overgrown right-of-way and returning west through our south pasture, ending at our barn.

By the time he got back from mass on Sunday†, conditions outside closely resembled the steam room at the Y. I suggested that I would prefer to run the trail in the early evening, when sun might let up on converting the woods and fields into a giant bamboo steamer.

As the shadows lengthened, a fire call.

Then dinner.

Then another fire call.

Oh screw it.

We ran it tonight, in a rainstorm. Forty-six hours old -- by far the oldest training trail we've ever attempted. I secured a scent article by stuffing a clean rag into one of his hiking boots (last worn on Sunday afternoon) and leaving it for half an hour, handling it only with a baggie. Rose and I started the trail when he called me from his exit, ten minutes away, and were well-underway when he got home and radioed that he'd slipped into the barn.

Now, keep in mind that I had a rough idea of how the trail ran. I carried his GPS, which included his track, in case I needed it. And the trail is marked. This was not a blinded trailing task, and as such did not simulate real work the way that a proofing or testing task would. It was on our own property, so almost guaranteed uncontaminated by more recent cross-trails of anyone except me -- and those only near the start and end points.

I did not need to consult the GPS. I could not see most of the flagging markers until I was right on top of them (he'd used a dark color that didn't show up well in the heavy foliage and poor light.) I had some misconceptions about the exact route that he took. I watched the dog, and did conventional man-tracking, finding frequent corroborating footprints and vegetation damage.

Although an angry broody turkey hen was flying at her as I scented her from the rag by the spring, about 50 feet from the trail, she ignored the assault and immediately went to work, bypassing the first tempting travel route and hooking a hard right turn onto the correct path.

She trailed with a high head. Normally Rosie has a moderately deep nose (by non-hound standards); on this very old trail, she never dipped her nose to the ground. She was working the vegetation at all times, and casting widely, making lots of loops. I usually use a 30' long-line to slow Rosie down and remind her that we are working as a team. I quickly removed it. She worked slowly and deliberately, despite the wide casting and looping. Where ground-level vegetation was heavy, she stayed very much to the trail; where it was sparse and there was bare ground, she had great difficulty. She frequently returned and demanded the scent article -- she normally almost never does that.

Where PC had left long streamers of flagging, these supplementary scent articles of a sort were clearly creating scent pools; she would become more animated near them, circle, frequently stand up on her hind legs to nose the flagging. She ordinarily does not respond to markers on fresher trails -- some dogs do, creating a challenge for marking those kinds of training trails, but Rosie has never paid them much mind. Even more interesting, she was "climbing trees" in the vicinity of the markers, catching scent on the bark at about 3' above the ground.

There were a lot of recent deer trails crossing, and these she ignored. She acknowledged scent from our neighbors' house when we passed about 200' from it, but was not distracted at that distance.

At the barn, where the ancient trail became fresh, she leapt into the air on the downwind side before circling back to the lower-level door and scratching to be let in, then searching the barn until she found PC in one of the back stalls.

She was rather pleased with herself.

As am I.

Now, what has been proven?

Well, in a very high-humidity, heavily-vegetated, contamination-free environment, Rosie can strike a 46-hour-old trail and provide a direction of travel. With some handler assistance provided via mantracking, she can complete the trail. These things are possible.

She "reads" differently on a trail of this age, and although she keeps focused and works hard, she is much more handler-dependent and less cocksure than on a fresher trail.

I am more willing to give a two-day-old trail the old college try than I would have been previously.

One possible SAR use of this ability is for the instance when we discover a revised LKP (Last Known Point) in the course of a long search. A field team that finds the missing hiker's sleeping pad in a thicket in the middle of the woods, and follows proper procedures for preserving the clue, can help a trailing team resolve the search before all the scent and sign in the area is destroyed by a hundred sets of firefighters' boots and half a dozen ATVs.

What has not been proven?

I wouldn't in a million years represent that Rosie could reliably strike a 46-hour-old trail or consistently complete one. In dry or frigid conditions. In the absence of vegetation. And most especially, with any significant contamination by other humans' more recent trails.

The task wasn't blinded, so my possible contribution to helping her through the tricky parts based on my knowledge of the tasks' parameters has not been controlled. It is possible to very subtly "push" a trailing dog while being quite sure that you are not doing so. These are bright, perceptive animals, and they will find the right answer by whatever means is available.

This is one task that I would have loved to record on video.

________

*Closed italics provided for the marital sarcasm-impaired.

† We never run a training trail without the tracklayer at the end of it, so his presence was non-optional.

Photo Phriday: Aerial Invader

Our neighbor swears that the first hundred feet of airspace is ours.

We are regularly invaded in the summer by this commercial endeavor



Scenic, sure, but it frightens the livestock, and the dogs hate it. They all leap to their feet, barking emphatically, when they hear the whuumph of the burner in the distance.



Rosie has developed a three-dimensional case of Mailman Syndrome.

She and Pip chase through the hayfield barking, snarling, and leaping into the air.

And the balloon runs away every single time. Success!



Next time, she will surely jump high enough to catch the trespasser.