I am a rural non-gun owner

[DeschutesRiver]

91. I've never lived where you couldn't hear the coyotes; this is probably the first place where

we were sitting out having coffee, heard yelping, then screaming as we watched a coyote flash over the top of our ridge (about 200' away), down the steep side to the wooded copse at the bottom, and kill a fawn. Then bam out of that wooded kill site came the coyote, running as momma deer came after him with a vengence - the two of them weaved all over the nearby cleared sagebrush area, the coyote bobbing and weaving, the deer getting close enough to leap and strike. She never completely caught up with the coyote. While I've seen the aftermath of many things get eaten here, I'd never seen it in progress.

Yesterday, dh heard a bird just screaming. He ran outside, and by our pumphouse, there was a very small barn owl making a meal of a robin. He said the owl slowly turned and looked at him, like, what? I gotta eat... and then went back to finish his very fresh meal.

This happens daily, and is as it should be - I am with you on enjoying things just as they are and as they come into view for us, too. Soothing is a good word for this experience. We don't have any meaningful diminishment of wildlife out here, because there really aren't many souls out here. I've heard we have feral pigs around here now, though I haven't seen them. And I won't have that here on our land, due to the concerns that others have already expressed elsewhere. That is some bad juju. The bears and cougars bother me not; that said, if I come across them in a kill while out and about on our ranch doing things, and am threatened (only way I can think of where I'd be in danger), I plan to survive it.

We do have rabid animals way out here, even more unusually for here, rabid bats in the last couple of years (that we've sent out for testing). During years where rabies cases are noted, we even vaccinate our horses with annual rabies shots. We are far enough out that we are our own first responders, for fire, police and medical, though we do have a life flight membership like the rest of our neighbors do (we've seen LF choppers land here and there nearby). The choppers get here way more quickly than we could drive to the nearest hospital, and we have a cleared area where they can land pretty close to the house. While we have put out a small lightening fire on our "ranch", and helped to put out others nearby, fire department support for our house is pretty much not possible due to the time it takes to get out here. In most directions that I look, there is nothing for 100s of thousands of acres. But being this remote, I am realistic.

If any of our livestock gets terminally injured, it will take quite a while of suffering for any vet to get here, and you can't transport an immobile 1200# animal to town, so we would be the ones doing the euthanisia, and that won't involve torturing the poor animal with a club as someone else mentioned. To each his own, of course, but I won't watch suffering and screaming go on for hours while we wait for someone else to do the heavy lifting. We raise our own cattle, and they are slaughtered here as well, either by dh or the mobile service, because I don't like what happens to feedlot cattle. If I buy anything, it is because I know where/how it is raised, fed & slaughtered (so I don't get much other than our beef).

Our nearest neighbor is a couple of miles away, and the rest are probably 5+ and beyond. You mentioned seeing nothing but farmland, so I assume you have no other nearby neighbors on smaller lots? Out here, there is no light pollution and there is no noise, not from cars, people, nearby equipment, streets, nothing. At this point in my life, I'd find it hard to be anywhere, even in a civilized rural area like yours, where people/noise/lights are any closer than 2-5 miles away, but as we age, that may change when we are physically unable to keep up here. And I sure feel that more and more as the decades pass by.

I guess there are many valid definitions of rural out there. But I can see that I have a lot of equipment out here that we use that most people, even those with other definitions of "rural", don't have or wouldn't ever need.