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May 14, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
17:07
Ranch adventures in rural TEXAS
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I just picked up two big heavy spools of barbed wire from the local ag supply store.
And these things are super heavy, by the way.
I don't know if you've ever strung barbed wire, but you've got to have these real thick leather gloves because this is four-point barbed wire.
Not the two-point wire.
Four-point wire means that every barb has four points.
And it's like four razor blades just hanging out there on this wire.
And the spool's got to weigh 100 pounds.
I mean, it's heavy.
And you've got to have several spools.
And when you're stringing up barbed wire, you have to use...
I mean, I like to use wooden posts for the corners.
And you'll put three posts up on a corner...
And then you'll use non-barbed wire as a tensioner to support the corners, and then you'll string up the actual barbed wire and connect it using pressure-connected, you know, clamp-connected little, I don't know if they're brass or what they are, but little copper, maybe copper-brass connectors.
And that's how you connect barbed wire.
Well, you have a tensioner, too.
A tensioner, kind of a ratcheted tensioner, so you get a lot of tension on it, then you connect it, and then you clamp it.
And all the while, the wire is trying to cut the crap out of your hands and forearms.
And there's no way to string out barbed wire without getting cut somewhere, somewhere along the line.
You're going to get cut or scraped.
Now, it's just all part of what it takes to be a true Texan, frankly.
You're outdoors, you're dealing with fences, you're dealing with cattle if you're out in the country.
Either you have cattle or your neighbors have cattle, one or the other, or like me, you have donkeys.
And we've got to keep the donkeys in.
And donkeys have a lot of room to roam, but you don't want them roaming, you know, 10 miles down the road to the neighbor's place.
Because technically, I think under Texas law, if your donkeys get out and go onto someone else's land for some period of time, then they can just claim they own the donkeys.
Not that they would want my donkeys, necessarily, but they might chop them up for dog food or something.
You never know.
So I don't want my donkeys getting out.
So you have to keep the donkeys in.
And so you've got to build fences.
And, you know, building fences, it's funny, before I moved to Texas, I had never actually built sturdy fences that are cow-proof or goat-proof or donkey-proof in Texas.
You want a test of building a fence?
Try to fence in some goats.
Because goats will stretch that fence like crazy.
They lean on it.
They rub on it constantly.
They just lean right into it.
Their whole body weight goes into the fence and they just rub up and down the fence or along it horizontally.
And any weakness in your fence will be discovered by the goats.
And they will...
Effectively open up a hole in your fence and then you've got escaped goats, which is not such a huge deal.
Escaped goats are still friendly, easy creatures to handle compared to everything else, but still you don't want to lose them because coyotes will eat them, right?
Or something else.
Coyotes would love to get your goats.
That's for sure.
Everything that we have here is trying to be eaten by something else.
You know, you have chickens like I do, backyard chickens, and the chickens are trying to be eaten by everything from rat snakes to owls to coyotes and even these hawks.
I don't know if they're actually hawks.
Some kind of attack bird like that.
They almost look like bald eagles, but I know they're not.
They have kind of white-tipped wings, and they're very common in central Texas.
I don't know what they're called.
They look like eagles, but I know they're not eagles.
Anyway, they'll swoop down and go after a wounded chicken if they think they can get one and if they're hungry enough.
So you've got to watch out for things like that.
Now these rat snakes, by the way, They like to eat eggs and baby chicks.
And they'll even try to eat sort of mid-range chickens that are, you know, a couple of months old.
They're not babies anymore, but they're not quite adults.
They're kind of mid-sized chickens.
And these snakes will try to eat those chickens, but they can't.
But what they do is they attack the head of the chicken, so they'll swallow the head and they'll suffocate the chicken.
And then they won't be able to eat the rest of the chicken.
It's too big.
So eventually the snake spits it out.
And what you find in the morning, and sadly this has happened to me before, in the early days, until I learned how to defend everything.
But what you'll find in the morning is a dead, mid-sized chicken with a wet head.
And at first, when I saw that, I was like, what the hell?
What is slobbering on my chicken heads and killing the chickens, even though they don't look damaged otherwise, turns out it's these rat snakes.
Now what I do is I capture these rat snakes.
I just pick them up with a snake grabber, and I put them in a barrel, and then I relocate them.
You know, I put the lid on the barrel, and then I relocate them and let them go far from the chickens.
I don't like to kill the rat snakes because the rat snakes are eating, well, rats and mice.
And there are lots of rats and mice all over the place.
In fact, I saw a rat snake just yesterday crawling across an air compressor that I have in my barn.
And I decided not to relocate it because I'd noticed some rats in that barn.
So I was like, well, hey, let the snake clean up, do a little rat patrol here.
And then, you know, if it starts to bother the chickens, then I'll relocate it.
Some people kill the rat snakes.
But if you kill the rat snakes, you're going to have a runaway rat population.
So it's about keeping everything in balance.
And if the rat snakes eat the eggs from time to time, it's not such a big deal.
They're chowing down on them right now, by the way.
Oh, the funny thing is if you catch a rat snake that just swallowed an egg, they can't really move very effectively.
They have this big egg right behind their head, and they're trying to swallow the egg.
And if you catch them like that, they can't bite you.
And what they'll do, if you grab one, they will try to spit up the egg, or it'll break Like, they'll try to squirm around and they'll break the egg, and then all this egg comes out of their mouth.
There's like egg yolk and egg slime, you know, just coming out of their mouth, and then they're really angry because they lost the egg, and then they can bite you, so you might want to let go at that point.
But these rat snakes...
They really hate to be disturbed in the middle of their egg buffet.
Their egg McMuffin all-you-can-eat buffet.
But they sure look funny with a giant egg stuck in their throat.
I'll tell you what.
But they're not venomous, by the way, so even if they do bite you, it's not the end of the world.
Don't let them bite you on the face, because they can bruise you up.
They have a lot of small teeth.
They could scar you, you know?
So don't let rat snakes bite you in the face, or the neck, for that matter.
Pretty much a good rule about living in Central Texas is don't let any animal bite you in the neck.
That's kind of a good rule of thumb.
Protect your neck.
Okay, let's see.
What else is happening here?
Oh yeah, I meant to mention, get back to the fence building.
I hadn't built a fence until several years ago when I first moved to Texas.
And I didn't know how to build a fence.
And if you're not from Texas and you're not a rural person, and it's not just Texas, you know, there are rural people in Oklahoma and Utah and Idaho and lots of places.
But I mean, just if you're not used to being around ranches and farms and stuff, You probably don't know how to build a fence.
And I guarantee you, most millennials don't know how to build a fence.
Just, frankly, most people don't know how to build a fence.
Most people think you just put a bunch of posts that are standing straight up, and then you just string a fence across all of them.
And what that accomplishes is a domino effect of a fence that all falls down at the same time.
Because all it takes is one force on one end of that fence And it'll pull all the fence posts down.
You don't build fences by just hammering posts into the ground, straight up and down.
That's not strong.
You gotta build like an H-brace or a corner brace.
And an H-brace, you put two or three posts in the ground, and then you stick a piece of pipe in between them.
And then you run a wire, a strong, strong wire, diagonally.
Across that H-brace, and then you put, usually you put a tensioner in that wire, like you might take a steel rod or a piece of rebar and put it in that wire, and then you can twist that rebar up to tighten it up, and that creates tension in that H-brace, which has vertical stability.
So that fence can't move to the left or the right, no matter how much pressure is pulling on it one way or the other.
And if you drive around a rural area, you're going to see everybody's got H-braces.
You may have never noticed them before.
And every H-brace has a diagonal wire component, which is a tension wire.
You probably didn't notice that if you weren't looking.
And then in between those H-braces, you might see some T-posts that are vertical up and down, or even some wooden posts that are just up and down.
Those can string along for 100, 300, 400 feet.
And then you're going to hit another H-brace or another corner brace, which provides the stability.
And that's how you can stretch barbed wire and get tension on it.
If you don't have the H-brace, you can't tension the wires.
And if you don't have tension on the wires, cattle will walk right through them.
Cattle, especially Texas Longhorns, they'll use their horns and they'll flip up loose barbed wire and create a gap.
And then a cow, a pretty big cow, like an 800-pound cow, will walk right through the hole in that fence.
I guarantee you they'll step right through it, even with barbed wire and everything.
I've seen them do it.
They're like Houdini, bovine Houdini escape artists.
They can get through almost anything.
So, if you're new to Texas and ranching and all this stuff, and you see this, you're freaking out.
You're like, how did that cow walk through that fence?
Well...
Cows have all day to figure it out, frankly.
They've got ways to escape through fencing.
And if you want to keep your animals in and keep your animals safe, you've got to get up to speed.
But the reason I mention all this, by the way, is just to share with you some real-world, actual, practical, hands-on stuff.
If we're in a collapse scenario or we're in a grid-down scenario and you're living out in the country somewhere, you're taking care of ranch animals as maybe a food source to not starve to death, you know?
You've got a cow or a few cows, whatever.
These are basic skills.
And when I hear people talk about survival, I hear a lot of people doing a lot of interesting, like almost kind of pretty far out there types of things.
You know, like, oh, how can I make a motion-sensitive light tripwire off a solar grid, you know, and all this stuff.
And I'm like, dude, do you even know how to just build a fence?
You know, why are you freaking out about all this stuff that's probably never going to happen when you don't even know how to keep a cow in a yard?
That you should start with the basic.
And I tell you, if it ever comes down to needing these skills, there are so many people that really have never done any of this kind of thing.
I guarantee you, if you're, for the first time, You have to raise chickens or for the first time you have to take care of cows or goats or rabbits, whatever you're raising for food.
And by the way, rabbits are a favorite of a lot of preppers because they're really easy to deal with and they have very high efficiency of generating meat out of food.
I don't have rabbits, but a lot of people do.
But if it's your first time doing it, you're going to lose.
Some animals.
Because you don't know the mistakes.
I knew a family in Central Texas that had, I think, I don't know, 20 or 25 hens that they had just gotten.
I don't know where they bought hens, but they bought hens.
And they set up a chicken coop in their backyard, which was right up against the forest.
And one morning, they woke up and all their chickens are dead or gone.
All of them.
100% wipeout.
And it was coyotes.
Coyotes had come out of the forest and smelled chicken McNuggets, and they went to a feast on those.
And the family, I remember talking to the family, and they were like, we didn't realize that there were coyotes out here.
I said, where are you from?
Where are you from?
They said, well, Austin, we're from the city.
Oh, well, say no more.
You city people, you think there are no coyotes in the forests of Central Texas?
You need a big dog, for starters, and you need a rifle, and you need to lock up your chickens.
At night, by the way, or other things will get them too.
And it's like, there's a checklist of things you got to do if you don't want to lose all your chickens.
And if you lose your chickens in an actual survival scenario, that could be the end of your life that could cause starvation.
You know, you could die from losing them.
So these are skills that can save your life and also save the lives of your chickens or your cattle or your goats or your donkeys or whatever the case may be.
And that's why It's one of the reasons that I decided to raise chickens.
Not that I needed the eggs or that I needed the extra hassle of just lugging grain around all the time and feeding chickens.
Believe me, that is not my definition of recreational spare time.
But I knew that I needed the know-how.
I wanted the knowledge of how to take care of chickens.
And now I've got that knowledge where if I lost all my chickens or gave them away, I know I could restart a flock of chickens and protect it and get eggs.
And if I wanted to even get chicken meat, if I didn't mind, you know, killing the chickens, although I don't do that now in a survival scenario, I would do that.
So these are hands-on skills.
And there are a lot of people who have skills in the virtual world.
They're experts at Snapchat.
They're experts at SEO marketing.
They're experts at theoretical astrophysics or quantum theory and all this stuff.
None of that helps you eat in the real world.
None of that helps you protect animals in the real world.
You need to have a combination of real world skills plus whatever your expertise is for your economic compensation, job market, that kind of thing.
But all these real-world skills, this is why I really enjoy living in Central Texas, because it challenges you every day.
You deal with flooding, fires, droughts, predators.
You deal with erosion.
You deal with trying to save lives of animals.
You deal with practical firearms.
How do you defend your wildlife?
Well, I guess it's not wildlife, your ranch animals against animals.
Wild predators and so on.
You deal with practical hands-on things.
And if you're good at it, then you have a sustainable system.
If you suck at it, then everything's collapsing on your farm.
And you can't sustain your farm.
And eventually a lot of people end up leaving the farm and they move back to the city.
I've seen that happen too.
In some cases because they just lack the skills and everything they tried just totally collapsed because they could not run a farm in a sustainable way.
If you can't run a farm, then you're going to have trouble in a collapse.
Trust me on this point.
I'm watching this rooster right now, by the way.
This rooster is insane.
He's running around trying to mate with any hen that he can grip.
You know, these roosters are like that, too.
They're just vicious.
This guy, he's like Eric Schneiderman.
He's like the New York Attorney General cock running around the chicken yard.
He's like having intercourse and then beating up the chickens.
It's like a day in the life of Eric Schneiderman.
I should call that rooster Schneidercock.
That's what I'm going to call him.
Hey there, Schneidercock.
Leave that chicken alone.
I've got to go stop this guy.
He's getting out of control.
Take care.
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