Freedom for my chickens! All it took was a man with a gun

If I haven’t mentioned my poultry for a while, it’s because the subject has been too depressing. I had been very fond of my ducks and chickens until the constant attacks on them by foxes began to harden my heart. I had protected them in every way I could, short of keeping them cooped up all the time; but as a fox kept on killing them all the same, I almost stopped caring. Acceptance of their seemingly inevitable fate brought with it a loss of interest. If they were going to die, I must learn to be indifferent.

For a while, I felt callous only about the ducks, six out of my flock of 14 ducks had been killed, but only one of my nine chickens had gone. I took this to be because the chickens lived much nearer to my house than the ducks, so that a fox would always encounter ducks first on its visits to my garden to find food for its cubs.