Ok, there is a story here, and it does take a little explanation.  As we have said before, we have free range chickens here at the Ranch.  They roam the pastures during the day and stay in a nice chicken tractor at night.  For the first 8 or 9 months that we had them we kept them pretty much confined to a 4’x8′ enclosed (by chicken wire) area in front of the enclosed portion of the chicken tractor (see the chicken tractor below)

Mountain Sky Ranch Large chicken tractor

We moved the tractor daily, and it was an incredible source of fertilizer for our pasture.   Starting this summer we opened the gate to the outside area and allowed the chickens to roam in a temporarily fenced (Premier Electric fencing – great company) area.  At night we would put them back inside the inside space and close the doors.  As the summer went on we started letting the chickens roam more and more independently without the temporary fencing.  The fertilized more pasture, and killed more insects.  All good!  Then one night we forgot to close them into the tractors enclosure in the evening.  Well in the morning we were missing 5 chickens.

That was about a month ago.  Last night it was raining all evening and as we got engaged in other activities and the evening wore on, we forgot to go close the doors on the tractor again (dumb us!) and guess what today 6 more dead chickens.

So what do we learn from this Dumb action.  Well, I hope it will teach us that you cannot cheat nature! We know that the other time we forgot to close the tractor we had a predator issue (by the way we do not know what the predator was, but suspect a fox), so we should have known the same thing would happen the second time.

And, you know what, this little lesson for us has much bigger implications.  We make very similar Dumb decisions about much bigger environmental issues daily (not properly handling quality control standards – BP?) thinking we can get away with our Dumbness just this one time.  But we cannot.  We know the right decisions to make, and our Dumbness is not an excuse for making wrong decisions.

Well back to work here at the Ranch.  Until next time – I know you will not be Dumb like us – right!!