Brutal start, Beautiful Sunrise

The day did not start out as beautifully as the sunrise suggests.   Shorty started barking at a fox about an hour before sunrise, and thirty minutes before the alarm went off.  I had no chance of ignoring this as she sleeps on the bed, and she has a big bark.  I wasn’t going to let her out to chase foxes in the dark, so managed to settle her down again.   The next sound to shatter the early morning peace was the terrible scream of a rabbit dying in the jaws of a fox.  I had mixed emotions about this, I generally love bunnies, but we were getting over-run with them and I decided that if the fox eats the rabbits, he won’t be so hungry for the guinea fowl.  It was still too dark to feed the horses, so I snuggled back down into bed to try and sleep, but then my mind was off and racing thinking about how to eradicate foxes.  The environment minister in Australia has just called for research into a virus to eradicate feral cats and I wondered why they hadn’t tried to do this already for foxes.   There are various baiting programs and fox hunting campaigns, but foxes are still an issue.  The government has released the Calicivirus to kill rabbits and people keep rabbits (and cats) as pets so they have to be vaccinated, but no-one keeps foxes as pets so I am not sure why research into a fox virus hasn’t been progressed.  Unless of course, they want to keep the foxes to stay on top of the rabbits which are becoming immune to the calicivirus or Rabbit haemorrhagic disease.   After these rude awakenings, I didn’t want to get up, and the house was cold with the temperature down to 15 Deg C inside and 7 Deg C outside.  I was glad I grabbed the camera as the sky made up for the bad start.