I've never heard of a copperhead being so aggressive. When I was doing home improvements and crawling under houses they'd often.being coiled in a corner. I just avoided them and they never bothered me. You must be a heck of a marksman to hit the snake with your first two shots .
I worked on a cattle ranch outside of La Grande, OR in the 70s. A cow would sometimes break and come at me and I'd be up and over a 6 ft fence in a split second. The other hands would just shoo it away with their hats - made me feel quite stupid. Anyway, the bulls were penned inside a small electric fence. They were unbelievably huge - twice the size of the cows and all black and mean-acting. To me they weren't the same animal as the cows - more like a type of monster.
From Farm & Dairy: A bull, also known as a sire, is a mature male bovine that is at least 2 years old used for breeding purposes (not castrated.) A steer is a castrated male bovine. Male bovines are castrated when they are young and before they develop the bull’s physical characteristics, according to USDA. Steers are less aggressive than bulls (uh, yeh.) A cow is a mature female bovine that has had at least one calf. Heifers are young female cattle that have not yet borne calves. Both baby male and female cattle are referred to as calves. They’re called weaners once they’re weaned, and then yearlings once they’re a year or two old. Quickest way to determine gender Don’t rely on the appearance of horns on cattle to determine if an bovine is a cow or a bull. Instead, look between the animal’s back legs. A side view of the animal will offer you the best view to determine the gender. Cows have udders; bulls have scrotum. Steers will not have testes like bulls. Heifers have teats but no visible udder like cows do.
The neighbors behind us have chickens. We used to hear their rooster crowing all of the time, but have not heard him for the last week or so. They let the chickens just wander loose, so the rooster might have gone into the road and gotten hit by a car, or maybe into one of the other neighbor’s yards , where they have several large pit bulls on chains out back. Or , maybe they just made him into chicken dinner, who knows ? In any case, the other chickens are still wandering around, and our dogs have become “chicken-watchers” and all three dogs congregate around the back fence to see the chickens meandering around in the lot behind us. This morning, we had one right in our front yard, and almost out into the street. Bobby sent a picture to the owners, so maybe they will start making a safe pen for the chickens. Poodle was sitting on my lap out on the porch and about had a fit when he saw the chicken in the lawn just beyond us , wandering around and looking for bugs to eat. If our dogs would not kill chickens, I would like to have 2-3, just for the eggs; but we do not have any safe place to keep them away from the dogs.
When I was about 10 we moved from NYC to a small town in NJ. Well, when I say small, it was just a prairie and I thought my parents were nuts. We had an acre of land and I thought to myself, guess who's going to have to mow this mess with a push mower? Thus began a war between me and parents. Behind us where our property ran along the next block there was a guy who kept chickens and his rooster woke me up every morning at 5 AM sharp. About 15 minutes late another family a few doors up from him had a cow and she would begin lowing like crazy to be milked. I nearly ran away from home and hated that place with a passion. However, as the years passed, WWII ended and the building boom began. We grew and I ended up loving that place. Miss it like crazy to this day and still visit friends who stayed there.
I grew up a mile and a half from an unincorporated town where I was related to nearly everyone. Where I lived, houses were a half-mile apart or more, given that everyone had agricultural fields attached to their land. Across the road was a woods with a small river running through it where we could explore, get lost, and build shacks in, and we sometimes couldn't find those shacks the following year. I am pleased to have grown up in the country. Since leaving home, I have lived in some large cities, none the size of New York or Boston, but I have spent more than my share of living in the city. I kind of liked it when I was in my twenties because there were opportunities in the city that weren't available in a small town. As I entered my thirties, though, I tired of the traffic jams, the noise, and the light pollution. When I moved to Texas, I lived in Brownsville for six months and then found a house to rent in the much smaller city of Los Fresnos. The main causes of dissatisfaction between city people moving to the country and those who were born there relates to privacy, I think. Country people aren't used to other people telling them what they can do on their own property, largely because of the distance between houses. If I have farm animals, my neighbors can't smell them from their houses because they are a half-mile or more away. While there are certainly country people who take pride in having nice yards and freshly painted houses, they don't tend to demand the same of their neighbors, and would strongly resent being criticized for not mowing their lawn often enough and so on. Many people don't want property values to go up because that will only result in higher property taxes. When someone raised in an urban area decides to buy a farm in the county and live the good life, they bring a lot of expectations with them that their new neighbors aren't necessarily going to appreciate. Guns scare them, so they don't want anyone to have a gun and are likely to call the sheriff's department when they become aware of anyone shooting a gun. In most rural places, the sheriff's department isn't likely to do anything about it, but they may pay a visit to whoever it was that being reported, and nobody likes to have the cops called on them. Country traditions might include kids having guns, and city people certainly don't want to see that. For that matter, city people tend to be opposed to hunting. In a rural area where pretty much anyone can hunt anywhere they want, suddenly tracts of land are being closed off to them. While they may recognize land rights, it still doesn't make for good relations. Politically motivated people might move from the city to the country, and then start campaigns to impose gun control, greater hunting restrictions, or they might promote the creation of a national park or conservancy area, which changes everyone's lives. Up north, in Maine's Aroostook County, someone was faced with a lot of legal expenses because someone who had moved to the area was upset because they had horses. They filed complaints about the smell from the manure pile. Someone broke the fence one night, then filed complaints about the horses running free. The worst was when they got the ASPCA or some other group to file against the family, alleging that they were mistreating their horses, the chief exhibit being a 30-year-old horse that they claimed was malnourished. They were cleared on that one, given that the horse was old, not malnourished, and then another group got involved with the same allegations. They were cleared on that too, but I doubt they were able to recoup any of their expenses. When country people have a problem with something that someone else is doing, they usually live with it, but if it's something that they can't live with, such as if a horse were actually being mistreated, they'd take it up with their neighbor rather than filing complaints with state and federal agencies or getting agenda organizations involved. In small towns, many of the same things come into play, but there is also the problem that people who move to a small town from a larger city expect that the same level of public services will be available to them. When enough of them move to that town, they start demanding it, and all of this costs money. This results in higher property taxes and more restrictions on what people can do in their own homes. Where people are used to taking their own trash to the dump, now they have to pay for a trash collection service. Where they are used to shoveling the sidewalks in front of their homes, now the town has to buy equipment to keep the sidwalks clear, and hire someone to operate it. Where people may have their own water wells and septic systems, now they have to pay for an expensive municipal water and sewer system and, in most cases, are required to connect to it, which comes with higher property taxes and monthly bills. In most cases, the cost of running a public school system will increase a few times over, and the quality of education won't be increased at all, given that indoctrination will become the central point of instruction, as schools operated by people who aren't from that town will teach values that contradict with those of their students' parents. When you live in a small town and someone from Boston buys the house next to you, suddenly you are faced with complaints about your dog, your cat being in their yard, your compost pile, and so on. Here in Millinocket, people from away pushed through ordinances against outdoor wood furnaces, and we even had a compaign for ordinances establishing a theme for the town, in which people would be told what color they could paint their houses and any remodeling projects would have to fit the theme. That didn't pass, but it did lead to a great deal of discontent. I know there are people here who like to live in a neighborhood that is under a HOA, or where people are required to maintain a certain standard in their homes and yards, and that's fine, but when you take these expectations to people who didn't elect to be placed under these restrictions, discord can be expected.
@Ken Anderson Pretty much. I've seen it here. Those who move into someone else's neighborhood make no effort to be part of the existing community, and call the long-term residents "backwards," as "the tolerant ones" make efforts to repress that which THEY do not like. There was a case before I moved here where a new resident wanted guns outlawed, noise ordinances, and restrictions place on hours of operation of agriculture equipment. The then-current Board of Supervisors shot it down. I found the meeting minutes during my pre-move research, and it was one reason I chose this county. These days, I see the same corrupting inroads being made that I experienced outside of DC (Fairfax County.) Money talks. Your example of hunting struck a nerve with me. I had just bought the place and was driving down the right of way, and there were pickup trucks of men who had to pull aside for me (the place had been vacant for years.) They did not introduce themselves or engage in any pleasantries...they only asked if I was gonna allow hunting (they were the local "hunt club" and were not even friends of the other 2 families down here...they just kinda went wherever they felt like.) Not wanting to be "that guy" who shuts down areas they have hunted their entire lives, I said "Sure, but we have to have an understanding. I need to know when there are people on my property walking around with guns. And you need to know if I'm out there walking around with a gun. So just knock on my door or call me to let me know when you're gonna be out there and we'll see how it works out." Long story short, it wasn't long before I was sitting on my deck and heard shotguns maybe 50 yards from me. Then I could hear the guys standing over their kill...I could make out every single word. There was no notification. I had no idea they were out there. So I shut it down. I now let two guys hunt here. One is a guy up the road who wants to hook up his boss every once in a while. The other guy didn't even hunt himself, but helped me out when I moved here and had some EMS buddies the next county over who liked to hunt every once in a while.
@John Brunner, my hunting example was not intended to imply that I necessarily agreed with that point of view, but only that I recognize that it exists. I had a similar situation on my land up north, where I have a hundred acres. A man, who seemed like a nice enough guy, stopped by while I was working on my camp, and asked I minded if he hunted birds on my property. He talked about how he enjoyed being in the woods and had hunted that land for years. I told him to go ahead. A couple of days later, there were four pickup trucks, including his, parked on my potato field (which I lease out during growing season), and a whole group of people beating the bushes in the woods with whistles and horns, and banging things together, apparently intended to drive whatever it was they were hunting to an area where they'd be shot. I had never heard of hunting birds that way, so I don't even know what they were hunting. Well, that wasn't what I had expected. While I didn't mind someone walking through the woods with a gun, hoping to stir up a partridge or a pheasant, I didn't want every animal on my property driven out. I left a note on his windshield telling him that my permission had been withdrawn. The following year, I posted my land, although I've permitted people to hunt there, only with a more defined idea as to what was to be expected.
I tried to explain posting my property to a friend here, who was complaining about people moving to Maine and then posting their land against hunting by making a comparison. His family is in the maple syrup business. They own or lease a bunch of land with sugar maple trees and they tap that each year, selling maple syrup, maple candies, and other maple products. I told him that I don't hunt but I really like maple syrup, so what if I decided to go on his land and tap a few trees, and maybe invite some of my friends to do the same. He didn't get it, but I thought I'd made a good point.
Sometimes the sense of entitlement and lack of universality is what frosts me the most. And your earlier example of the guys beating the bushes for any living creature are what I've seen at times. I don't want to be near that kind of stuff or have that stuff on my property, because I'm also "any living creature." I don't see how anyone with a lick of sense would want to go "hunting" with people like that. I've though of posting my property, but it's an irregular shape with the boundaries laid out on an old plat in pols and rods. A formal survey was quoted at $5,000...and that was 10 years ago. Thank goodness the bank didn't require it when I bought the place (that was another horror story.) I had a guy offer to walk it with a compass for under $1,000 and stake out his "not for legal use" best guess.
'Hunting' doesn't seem like the right word or phrase. Orgy killing is more descriptive. That organized driving of animals towards slaughter is more like a group religious ritual than men's leisure activity. On my mother's side in North Carolina guns and hunting were not one of life's big features. The farms were small and poor, growing tobacco and a few vegetables and the obligatory few chickens and pigs. I picked a good amount of the sticky stuff in my summers there. Nothing on the planet smells better than a tobacco barn. We'd walk a few miles down dirt roads into the nearest village to trade a few eggs for candy and soda. I don't remember any kids under about fifteen wearing shoes. The biggest leisure activity for the grown-ups was just rest from work, aside from a little moonshine drinking. My mother's family went back to 1760 in the colony, about when the O'Savages came over from Ulster and became the Savages. They were 'Black' Irish with nary a redhead to be found among them. Over several generations no one could get wealthy and no one ever owned a slave. My great grandfather joined the Confederate Army as a drummer but never saw battle. For some reason he was honorably discharged to go back home and raise crops and livestock. There was intermarriage with the local Cherokees. My mother and my aunts all look full-blooded Indian. Those characteristics seemed to pop up randomly over the generations, then revert to more Caucasian type. I don't look Indian at all. Oddly, my mother and my father both had jet black hair and had six children with blonde or brown hair and not one of their children have black hair. That makes me BlackIrish-Welsh-Amerindian. Southern Cherokee-Celtic. I should remember Gaelic from my genes. I'm hardly what you'd call pure white so they'll have a hard time making me feel guilty over my 'race'. I'm almost my own minority group - American mutt, maybe. The topic is people living in the country and how they adapt to it. I've just taken that back a few generations.
Dwight Ward, you are painting with a large brush. Many many people hunt not for sport but for food. Some people love the stalk, the woodskills, the patience. Others just want meat in the freezer. Neither is any worse or better than the other. On our ritual family Thanksgiving day hunt we use the drive and stand method. This allows the older members of the family,who aren't as mobile as they used to be to contribute to the hunt. Youngers drive the elders stand I take a deer each year, I do not "hunt". I have had my land for better than twenty years, animals are habitual. At some point during season I will go out take my stand either early morning or dusk and harvest my venison for the season