Round Three Redux? Round Five-and-three-quarters? In any case, Welsh fans will be biting their nails, or any other available substance, and wondering if France can win with a bonus point and 21 points to deprive them of the title.
Scotland will no doubt have plenty to say about this, as a win with a six-point points advantage will put them second on the table (giving them their best finish in the Six Nations), supposing France don’t score a LBP.
Sadly, both teams can finish above Ireland. Maybe we should just cancel this match.
And maybe we should support France to wind up the OH.
Onna telly this week
Friday 26th March
| Gloucester v Exeter | 17:30 | BT Sport 3 |
| France v Scotland | 20:00 | BBC1 |
Saturday 27th March
| Glasgow v Treviso | 13:45 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Bristol v Harlequins | 14:00 | BT Sport 1 |
| London Irish v Bath | 15:00 | BT Sport Extra |
| Worcester v Northampton | 15:00 | BT Sport Extra |
| Wasps v Sale | 16:30 | BT Sport1 |
| Leinster v Munster | 17:00 | Premier Sports 1 |
Sunday 28th March
| Dragons v Edinburgh | 14:00 | Premier Sports 1 |
| Leicester v Newcastle | 15:00 | BT Sport 1 |
Ovally Balls 
The foxes are very fond of ours – any breed – not particular
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@Slade – Llabelled if it’s done been correctly to a llama.
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“The foxes are very fond of ours – any breed – not particular”
Bat-eared foxes, Hoary foxes, Tibetan sand foxes, Slade’s chickens are beset by the lot.
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’twas an Isla Brown craigs
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Chimpie ‐ Cross between a Rhode island red and a Rhode island white.
Nice. Tis a shame to lose a bird like that.
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Other names: Red Sexlinks.
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Good tale about an Irish lad making his way in NZ:
https://www.rugbypass.com/news/i-was-f-this-is-an-all-black-hitting-me-in-the-head-this-is-going-to-be-great-he-is-going-to-be-gone-one-of-their-main-players-regan-highlanders-super-rugby/
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It was a shame. It was some neurological issue which we couldn’t fix. She’d lost her sight, couldn’t stand up and stopped eating.
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@CMW
I’m watching you
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At least we now know what goes on in the melbury.
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You don’t know the half of it
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mainly work at the moment.
Need to build some steps to avoid a climbing expedition to get in and out.
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Apparently my great grandmother in Sweden rigged up a diy guillotine for multiple chickens over the feeding trough. She lived on her own in the middle of nowhere and was a bit eccentric by all accounts.
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To continue the macabre turn the blog has taken, I guy I worked for used to plunge chickens into a drum of boiling water.
He claimed it was the quickest, most humane method, but I was never convinced.
He also said it made plucking them easier, which I can believe.
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To continue the macabre turn the blog has taken
This reminds of when CJ punched a horse inna face.
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In a (probably unsurprising) twist from the current conversation, when we moved to the Borders, we took the two hen houses we had, but didn’t take any hens. One of them was a proper big hen house, the other was more of a hut, but had been used as a hen house. I remember asking about this – I think the reason they (or mum) didn’t have any was due to foxes (plain old Scottish foxes – not the exotic types Slade seems to get). This was despite the fact that there were a number of people around who could probably have built fox-proof fences around the huts. although Ticht will know better than I how feasible that actually was. We ended up using the small hut to temporarily house any orphaned lambs during lambing time (with a couple of bales in front of the door to stop them jumping out). I think they ended up just rotting away in the end – the hen houses, not the lambs.
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What did the other Royals say?
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Some innovative methods of hen dispatch there. the guillotine at the feed tray method sounds relatively humane. At least they won’t know it’s coming
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I miss our chooks but Mrs Craigs is against getting any more.
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Chimpie – but in your chooks case they just saw the inside of your mouth?
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You’ve set me thinking BB. I’ve never built a fox-proof fence. It would need to have a small mesh, and maybe some sort of overhang so that when it jumps it can’t climb over the top of the fence.
The alternative would be to have chicken wire walls and roof, which would be expensive and a bit of a pain in the arse to build.
I’ve seen heron-proof lines in a trout farm, it’s tough “string” attached to telegraph poles.
I’ve heard tell of elephant fences – they are supposedly a few feet off the ground, but very wide, like a sheep fence has been rotated 90 degrees to run parallel with the ground, though that might be bollocks.
I did build a bison “bucht” or handling system in France once. We used railway sleepers and concrete.
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It would probably need to be sunk into the ground a bit Ticht – unless Fantastic Mr Fox has been misleading me all these years.
I can just imagine a bison bucht being the size of a small castle.
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Freddie Owsley sings for Embra from Bristol.
Never heard of him, he comes from an athletics background and has a bit of toe, apparently.
24 years old, Scottish mum.
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BB, I’ve dug miles of trenches for rabbit-proofing. It’s not a fun job
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“sings”?
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Anti-fox fencing has to be surprisingly tall tobe effective – certainly over 2 metres – and that starts to get ugly.
Foxes are smart, can climb, and can work things out e.g. too small a mesh and it’s just like climbing a ladder.
An overhang (ugly) or electricity (nasty for everything else – e.g. hedgehogs) would work.
Otherwise one can trap them – using a live hen as bait in a safe compartment in a cage trap (not very successful)
Probably best of all is inviting Brookter and his dog for a year and ensure that both he and his dog urinate along the fence lines – foxes really don’t like that.
Nothing works 100% – not even the local hunt can keep up with the foxes
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When we kill hens it’s either first thing in the morning or in the evening.
Take each hen out of the coop, put a hand over it’s head and eyes and that keeps it calm and so doesn’t disturb the others; carry the bird a distance away and slit it’s throat with a very sharp knife.
put carcass in wheelbarrow out of sight. Repeat as necessary.
dunk dead bird in very hot water to release feathers, then pluck and clean.
Burn remains and cook or freeze carcasses.
Job done
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Slade, the boar/pig fences I built were made up of a fairly short high tensile mesh with two electric wires running on top to bring it up to the height of a sheep fence. Then we put an electric wire along the perimeter on the inside, perhaps 10cm off the ground on outriggers, this kept the pigs away from the actual fence itself and stopped them burrowing under it
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Ticht
yep – seen those round here.
Can’t see Mrs Slade and I agreeing to install a new Stalag in the Gers, ‘though.
Anyway, far too busy to take on more hens at the mo’
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I’ve heard tell of elephant fences – they are supposedly a few feet off the ground, but very wide, like a sheep fence has been rotated 90 degrees to run parallel with the ground, though that might be bollocks.
Not much will stop an African elephant if it decides it wants to go somewhere. There’s a fabulous book called The Elephant Whisperer by the (late) Lawrence Anthony in which he recalls how no fences would stop angry elephants if they wanted out. I was in a little town called Kasane in the far north of Botswana a couple of years ago, where wild animals literally roam free in the streets. and my guide took me past his house to show me the broken wall: he had a wild fig tree in the garden and the elephants simply pushed the wall over to get to it. He gave up on rebuilding it eventually, and to his credit never thought of removing the tree “because it’s meant to be there.”
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What position does your new guy play, Ticht? Is he a ten(or)?
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Yeah, I don’t thinks there is much will contain an African elephant if it didn’t want to be so, Deebee.
Magnificent animals.
There was talk of us (the team in France) getting a huge contract in, iirc, Uganda, and that is how we got to planning what we thought might work. My boss’ thinking was that since elephants feel with their trunks an electric wire would keep them off the fence and he reckoned that they don’t like to put their feet on insecure ground, hence why the fence would be built “horizontally” in stead of vertically – they certainly wouldn’t be jumping over it.
As I say it might never had worked, it never got beyond us discussing it over several beers in the bar after work, then the money and set up all looked dodgy so my boss didn’t want to go near it in the end.
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He’s a winger, BB, fast as feck by all accounts. This from the blurb on the Embra site this morning.
The 6’4, 90.4kg wing/full-back – whose grandmother is from Govan – grew up in Bristol and trained with the south west arm of the Scottish Exiles out of Taunton while representing Bristol U18 as well as the academy talent identification set-up at Bristol City FC.
As a teenager his career progressed to Bristol A and included an invite to try out for Great Britain students, both of which he had to turn down as the demands of a blossoming athletics career took hold.
In a four-year spell away from rugby Owsley represented Great Britain U20 in the 200m, 400m, 4x100m and 4x400m and was crowned national 400m U20 Champion before earning a place in the British indoor and outdoor senior 200m final.
He also lined up for the Junior Team GB squad in the 4x100m and 200m, before returning to his first love, rugby, with the Bears Academy last summer, making his debut in the Premiership Shield.
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Ticht, a quick Google tells me that there are specific types of fencing used to keep elephants at bay, so there must be something to it. But elephants have been known to bust up electric fences too.
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Regarding the new Embra signing
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Deebee, they could use the structures that keep the gable ends of tenement buildings from collapsing when they demolish ones the the middle :-)
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Refit, our daughter left to go back to Bristol for the final part of her degree this morning. I never did get the chance to come over and take in a Brizzle game along with seeing her… the best laid plans and all that.
I can’t believe it will have been three years.
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All we need is a game plan which gets the ball to the wingers (and other outside backs) without a face full of defence now.
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I screwed our wire chicken fence to our patio. Plus,our neighbours have dogs. Seems to keep the foxes out.
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Foxes have been seen in the area and we’ve had deer in the garden in the past, however, we’re pretty well enclosed now with fences and hedges so it’s tricky even for a fox with it’s cunning hat on to get in. the hen enclosure is some fairly basic wire mesh fencing about 1.5m high. At night the ladies are away inna sturdy little hoose with a daylight sensonred door.
Been safe so far.
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Hopefully that bold statement hasn’t doomed our feathery friends to an imminent gruesome foxy death.
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Deid as a neurologically challenged hen.
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We get a lot of foxes around here, they live in the huge graveyard just across the hill from us. They can get up onto the Downs easily enough but there are better picking in the bins from the houses, the council have supplied every house with big wheelie bins because of the mess made by the combined efforts of the foxes and the shitehawks, sorry, seagulls.
They can be a bit of a pain in the arse when you are walking the dog at night, they follow us around the streets.
I’ve had to chase them away several times. I don’t know if they’d attack a dog on a leash, but I wouldn’t want to find out
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Foxes are lurking patiently Chimpie. They know you’re distracted here.
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Chimpie – why does it need to be neurologically challenged? Hens are well dense.
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I can see everything from my Melbury. No foxes getting close
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hens aren’t that dense. They can be a bit sinister though.
Sitting and staring at me working.
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Everything?
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I’ve told my cannibal chickens story on this blog before. It’s fairly hideous.
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Not heard about the cannibal chickens craigs.
The cat once brought a live mouse back to the garden to play with. Hens chased off the cat and proceeded to peck the mouse to death. Pretty grim way to go.
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