Having a homestead isn't all cozy videos, cuddly chickens, and freshly baked bread. It comes with hard decisions about animal health and protection, even if that means discussing another animal's life.
Homesteader and TikToker @leathernecklilah had a positive relationship with her neighbor, who owned all of the land around her property, until her neighbor's dog started using her property as its own personal killing station.
Lilah is a keeper of several dozen chickens that she had raised from eggs, and she keeps them as pets and sells their eggs to members of the community. But the neighbor's dog had already attacked on her property multiple times, sometimes killing one chicken and sometimes several.
The neighbor insisted that this land belonged to the dog and that there was nothing they could do about the dog's behavior. They placed the responsibility on Lilah to close up her chickens where the dog wouldn't be able to reach them. The problem was that Lilah had an enclosed area for the chickens, a yard to free graze, as well as their front porch, and the dog welcomed itself into every space.
Lilah noted that after the sixth attack, the neighbor remained unwilling to help, so Lilah's husband stated that he planned to shoot the dog if it came on the property again to attack the chickens.
While she didn't want anything bad to happen to the dog, it was clear that the situation wasn't going to improve if something with the dog itself didn't change.
You can watch the video here:
In a video posted the next day, Lilah collected video footage from her outdoor cameras of many of the incidents in which the neighbor's dog came on to her property and hurt her animals.
In many cases, the dog could be seen cornering and killing the chickens, while others caught glimpses of the dog racing through the yard after the flock, with notes of how many chickens he'd killed that day. In the final segment, Lilah found one of her chickens wounded and brought her into her home, hoping she'd recover from her severe dog bites.
While they didn't necessarily condone violence, some TikTokers pointed out it was Lilah's right to defend her livestock by any means necessary.
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Others went so far as to say that she would be negligent toward her family if she continued to be so patient.
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As heart-wrenching as it might be to think of hurting the dog to stop the behavior, this was one of those situations where the dog had basically been taught that this was okay behavior because of not being corrected sooner, and other animals were harmed and killed because of it.
Though they might not need to harm it, perhaps filing reports and putting a price on each chicken would encourage the dog's owners to better retain it.
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