Well fuck.

Where to begin?  I’ll start with the moment and work backwards.

I took the truck to run some errands.  Fifteen miles later I looked at the gauges and the oil pressure gauge was between the “n” of “normal” and the low mark.  As I watched, it continued to move towards the L.  I turned around as soon as I could; fingers crossed that I would be able to make it home.  At one point it reached the L line, but then jumped back up to almost the “n”.  Then it started inching back down to the L.  I made it home without the engine making any terrible sounds and the oil gauge a fingernail’s distance from the L line.

I lost one of the chicks this morning.  It was one of the modern english games.  I left the brooder door open so they could get out in the sun and forage a bit, then I went back inside and got online to read the news.  About an hour later I went to feed the dogs and realized Sadie was missing.  Fuck.  She’d climbed the fence and was in the front.  With the chicks.

I’m not sure what happened.  I stepped outside and saw Sadie running down the driveway towards me.  She was a good distance away.  When she bounded up the porch steps she went right past a chick that was sitting on the bottom step and didn’t give it a second glance.  After Sadie was in the house I went out to assess the carnage.In addition to the chick on the steps, there were 5 chicks cowering in the corner of the porch steps and the porch, 2 under the porch, one trapped between the porch and the brooder and the rest in the brooder.  They were all acting a bit traumatized.

Did Sadie kill the chick or did she chase off whatever did?  On the one hand, there was the turkey incident… but those poults were only a couple of days old and inside the house.  On the other hand, she never shows any interest in the adult chickens that I have, and the chicks are old enough that they look like small versions of the adults. When I let the dogs out into the front yard, Scotty and Jasmine show interest in the chicks in the brooder, but Sadie pays them no mind.

How devious are dogs?  Would she kill one chick then run up the driveway on some other purpose, leaving the other chicks alone?  That’s some Machiavellian thinking.  I’ve seen dogs be sneaky before and they’re about as cunning as a 3 year old child.

Maybe, if she was really hungry, I could see her killing one, satisfying her hunger and then losing interest in the others.  But this isn’t a case of a starving dog looking for a meal.  She’s well-fed so killing the chicks would have been for sport.  My only experience with that was when my friend brought his dog over and she went after the chickens.  It was a free-for-all.  That dog was going after chickens left and right, and didn’t stop until I had her by the collar.

I’m going to give Sadie the benefit of the doubt.  Other than her being in the front yard about the same time a chick went missing, there’s no evidence she was the culprit.  Her behaviour and demeanour imply she’s innocent.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.