Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 August 1878 — A Novel Fox-Trap. [ARTICLE]

A Novel Fox-Trap.

In West Fryeburg, Me., lives a wellknown farmer named T. J. Haley, whose coops had been visited nightly by a hnngry fox, and one evening the rascal killed eleven half-grown chickens, ten of which he ate or carried off, leaving one dead on the ground near the scene of slaughter. Mr. Haley was considerably provoked, as would naturally be expected, and resolved to set a novel <rap for his foxship. So the next day he drove two stakes into the ground a few rods from the coops, split them partially open, and placed a loaded gun in the crevices, carefully pointed toward the hole under the nearest coop where the fox had crawled in to get his plunder. In this hole he placed the dead chicken, fastened by a cord to one end of a piece of wood arranged to play forward and back, like a whiffletree, and to the other end of this stick he tied a rope, connected with the trigger of the gun held in position by the two stakes, as previously mentioned. He took pains to sight the gun about as high as an ordinary hat above the hole under the coop, also carefully adjusting the rope so that nothing could discharge the gun unless the chicken in the hole was laid hold of. The next morning, on visiting the coop, there lay the misguided fox, dead as a door nail, with his head in the hole, and the fatal chicken in his stiffened paws. The plan worked to a charm, and makes, perhaps, the first case on record where one of the wiliest of the animal kingdom was enticed into becoming the instrument of his own destruction.