How Can People Who Move To The Country Not Understand Nature?

Once a dog starts chasing and attacking any kind of animal, it is almost impossible to stop them. I know what you mean about trying to stop a chicken killing dog, and there is now much you can do. Even if you muzzle the dog so that they can’t kill the chicken, they still will run them until they are exhausted. They have to be either inside, kenneled, or on a leash/tie rope.

What part of Oregon did you live in ?

 

When I was a kid, we had a pet fox for about two-and-a-half years, raising it from a pup. It wasn't penned and was free to go anytime it wanted to, but it didn't even bother our chickens, although we had several chickens. We had two dogs, and they tolerated the fox, who was like a puppy on amphetamines. It annoyed our older dog a lot because it always wanted to play, and the older dog wasn't interested in playing with a fox, although the younger one did. Even after it decided to wild itself when it was a couple of years old, it would come around sometimes for a free meal from the dog food bowl, and it still didn't kill our chickens. The dogs remembered it apparently because they didn't bark at it, as they would any other fox that came around.

 

That's pretty cool.

I like fox. When I first moved here, the place had been vacant for at least 5 years...maybe much longer. So there were lots more critters at first than there are now that I've been around. I would get up at 4:30AM or so and sit on the deck with a pot of coffee, a small light and a book, and read a bit before going to work. The fox would walk right by the deck, yapping their heads off for each other.

Eating out of a bird ground feeder:


Getting lucky on my dime:

 

Thanks for that, Peter, and for the refresh in basic genetics. I had forgotten some of the terms.

This article from Smithsonian provides some interesting data:

So they go from saying "male and female cattle have horns" to stating:

I'm not certain what they mean by "large cattle." And they say "vast majority," not "exclusively."
So apparently, horned female bovids and cervids are the exception.

 

Antlers and horns are totally different. While antlers are something that grows back each year during the mating season, and then is shed off each spring; horns are something that appears soon after birth, and are there permanently.
As @Peter Renfro explained about cattle, some are naturally polled (hornless)and some have horns. Goats are the same way, and often the horns are removed when the animal is a very young baby. I know that they do this with goats, and I think that they also do it with some cattle and sheep.
Antlers do only appear on the males of the species, whereas horns will grow on both genders unless it is a polled breed of that species.

 

This is stuff I like reading about.

Before the days of the internet, people would raise these types of questions (usually at work), admit they had no idea, then just turn around and walk away, comfortable in their admitted ignorance. I always found that to be unacceptable. If you care enough to ask, dammit, then you should care enough to go find the answer!

So I carried a little notepad in my shirt pocket. When stuff like this would come up and no one knew the answer, I would write it down. When the list got long enough, I'd burn up a Saturday morning in the library finding the answers, and then take them back to work and share them.

Some people were appreciative.
You can guess what the others thought.

Regarding Peter's post, I saved the pdf he linked to my hard drive.

 

@Yvonne Smith

From the article:

Of course, lots of this depends on how well the terms are defined.