| The Good Life
Military wisdom falls flat when facing the most cunning of foes.
Greg Dixon
The evil chickens have been having house guests. I popped out to their luxurious coop the other night, opened the door and found myself staring at two of them. They stared back, before attempting to hide.
Now, I’m pretty sure our bossy wyandotte chooks haven’t been listing their home on Airbnb, although, as they are undeniably the spawn of Satan, one can never be sure. In any case, I wasn’t having it. I went into the coop and asked their lodgers to leave.
The one lying low in one of the laying boxes took a bit of persuasion but eventually fled past me and out the door.
The other, clearly a more experienced squatter, disappeared altogether, probably through a gap between a wall and the roof. That’s what you call rat-like cunning. But then, of course, these house guests were exactly that, rats. Rats? Run for your life! Well, not really. I’ve never understood the fear they generate. One would rather not have them disappear up a trouser leg, certainly, but when encountering them, one must keep in mind they will always be more frightened of you than you are of them.
Oh, but they carry diseases, people say. Yes, well, people carry diseases and I don’t run away screaming at the sight of them.
Still, rats in the coop aren’t best poultry practice. When I consulted the exhaustive and rather flash “special edition reprint” of New Zealand Lifestyle Block magazine’s How to Care for Your Poultry, it informed me that “the first thing you do when you set up a lovely hen house is create a fantastic new home for rats and mice”. However, the flashy guide is rather short on actual solutions, saying only, “You will need to come up with a plan on how to control rats and mice because you won’t ever eradicate them.”
Aplan. These always involve strategies, tactics and, well, rat-like cunning, things I have sorely demonstrated to friends, enemies, frenemies and chess opponents that I simply don’t possess.
What I needed was help. I needed the wisdom of a mentor, someone like Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th-century Prussian soldiering bloke. Von C, who famously suggested that war is the continuation of politics by other means, was going to be my man. But it turns out his book On War is really long and boring. On the other hand, the ancient warrior Sun Tzu’s The Art of War runs to only an hour and 7 minutes on audiobook, or even less if you just google quotes.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles,” Sun says. I meditated on this, then googled “rats”.
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win,” Sun says. I mediated on this, and figured he was just messing with my head.
“He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious,” Sun says. I meditated on this, but decided there isn’t enough room in the coop for me to “lie in wait” without the evil chickens merrily pooping on my head.
“Invincibility lies in the defence; the possibility of victory in the attack,” Sun says. I meditated on this, then nailed and poked bits of chicken wire over and into every hole and gap, then bought and strategically positioned two chook-proof bait boxes. The rats are still getting into the coop. They don’t appear to be eating the bait.
So the war continues, and I’m worried even googled wisdom can’t help me win it. Mind you, as Von Clausewitz may have said, worrying about a thing is the continuation of doing something about it, just by other means.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”