IQ

As I mentioned in a previous post chores must happen at the worst times. Recently, it's been hauling firewood and buckets of water in -11 degree weather. This has actually consumed two to three hours of my day for quite a while (one reason I haven't posted recently). The reasoning behind all this is rather complicated; basically, we decided to get a heat pump because A. It's cheaper than an oil furnace and B. It keeps the house warm, however this was made on the assumption C. The guys selling and installing the heat pump knew what they were talking about. C was false. Although they might know how to install a heat pump in any ordinary building, they hugely underestimated the capabilities of our rambling farm house to lose heat.

To make up for their oversight, we build a fire in our fireplace, which heats exactly one whole room (out of the ten or so in our house). So the long and the short of it is that I carry a lot of wood in the freez'n cold weather, so when I get done I can warm my hands over the pile of smoldering sticks (where there's smoke there's fire, right?).

You might be wondering where the buckets of water come in, but then again you might not (there's no rule that you have to have a brain to read this blog). Well, lets just say that it only freezes for a week or so each year so why bother insulating the water pipes to the barn. Yeah, so that means for that "week or so" I get the chore of carrying buckets of water to all the livestock (some of which I wish were deadstock, but that's another story). I've figured out that it takes an average of fourty buckets a day to water three cows and three steers. It also takes an average of two buckets a day to water thirty chickens (however chicken water feeders are rather complicated to use when full of frozen water, trust me). As a bonus who ever guesses the average number of buckets it takes to water two goats, one mini-horse, and a dog, gets brownie points.

So I'll finally get to the title of this post. Lately we've had what you could call a livestock IQ test. This test is pretty simple, however many of your livestock are likely to fail. All the animal has got to do is drink water out of a bucket, however this can prove very challenging for the limited IQ of some idiots we keep on our place. Here's the setup: the animal has a bucket of water in front of it, it must drink this water, the catch is it's below freezing so the water will eventually freeze.

Results on our farm with ratings from one to eleven:

2 Cows; Hmm, it looks like he's putting water in our tub...two hours later...hmm, he must have put a rock in it instead. If we push the tub across the field maybe the rock will turn into water.

1 Chickens: IT'S WATER! MINE! MINE! MINE! Oh, it's just water, I'll get some later...later...this stuff is too cold, I'll wait and then maybe it'll be warm...later still...it's hard...much later...I feel like I'm gonna die of thirst.

8 Goats and Horse: Water, I guess I'll drink some...I'm thirsty again, but the water is covered with ice I guess I better get to licking a hole through it.

11 Dog: This water is crazy HOT! This can't be water! It might kill me!

As the results show, it pays off not to be a total idiot (just see who turns into steaks and chicken pot pie), but if you think too much, it can make you act worse than an idiot.