GUINEA FOWL FIASCO 🪦😔

"Despite Sterling’s urgent attention, the fowl was finished..." 

Have you ever had to train a puppy?  Training kids is one thing but training a puppy takes things to a whole ‘notha level.  If you read my other post you’ll know that our new puppy, Scout, ate my Starlink internet cable a few weeks ago.  It’s fixed now.  But Scout is still hungry. 

We checked out five dog training books from the library and the kids are doing their best to train Scout.  I’ll admit I haven’t been overly involved in the puppy-training process but I think it’s a fair deal that I train the kids and the kids train the dog.  Scout isn’t the only animal we have.  We have a couple calves, a few laying hens, ducks, a kitten and even a couple piglets.

Along with our pigs and puppy we have five baby keets.  To be more accurate, we HAD five.  Keets are baby guinea fowl.  Guinea fowl are birds about the size of a chicken and we were told they love to eat bugs, including ticks.  We discovered a lot of ticks on kids this spring so we got the fowl.  Ours are not full-grown yet.  Scout is a bit scared of the ducks and chickens but we have noticed him chasing the smaller keets.  What could possibly go wrong?

I was in town yesterday and got a text from my wife with a picture.  It was a picture of my son, Sterling, feeding one of the guinea fowl with a medicine dropper.  The text simply stated, “Guinea fowl fiasco.”  We had seen Scout nip and chase the keets around the yard.  He caught one once but the kids rescued it and all was well.  Sterling went out and did some dog training to teach Scout not to chase the keets.  It seemed to work…until I got the text.  This fiasco was a bit different.  Despite Sterling’s urgent and timely veterinary attention, the fowl was finished. 

I heard the story later that Justice, my 10-year-old son, was out feeding the chickens and saw Scout chase the keet into the bushes.  Scout came out of the bush with the keet in his mouth.  Justice ran to catch Scout, hoping to rescue the small bird but was too late.  There were some sad faces around here and our small flock of fowl is now down to four keet.  The main reason we got Scout was to protect our birds from the coyotes!  As a Canadian musical artist once said, “Isn’t it ironic?  Don’t you think?”  

So, do we get another dog to protect our birds from the dog we already have?  Do we ramp up the pet-training regime?  So many questions.  A friend was telling me the other day about the life lessons our kids can learn from pets.  He even mentioned lessons about death and grief.   I don’t think they’re very fun lessons but I think agree.  My 3-year-old Mabel smiled as she told me that, “The keet is in heaven.”  I don’t know if all pets go to heaven but they certainly leave earth.  Time flies, dad.  Make every moment count!  Even the sad ones.