The latter is an excellent trait for if you wish to remain on moderately pleasant terms with your neighbors, train your dog or dogs to stay home.  Worrying the cat of the man who lives just at the bend in the road to the south, or killing the chickens of the neighbor to the north, will not aid in establishing friendly relations.  Barking at passing cars is not commendable nor is the tipping over of a neighbor’s garbage can and scattering the contents about.  These are bad habits and should be corrected if your pet is to be any real comfort to you.  Patient and intelligent training will mark the difference between a friendly well-mannered dog and a spoiled brute that even your most humane friends yearn to cuff.

When it comes to the matter of other livestock in this venture of farming-in-the-little, the new owner is either treading unknown or forgotten ground.  Dogs and cats, even canaries and white rats, were familiar enough in the city.  He has read books on their care and training.  He has consulted veterinarians and fanciers but until now the sources of his daily bottle of milk or his carton of graded eggs have been matters of indifference.  The venture with livestock may begin with chickens and end with saddle horses, but it is nothing for the uninitiate to enter into lightly or unadvisedly.  Personally, we prefer to let the farmer down at the end of the lane wrestle with the recalcitrant hen and temperamental cow.  He has summered and wintered with them for years and knows the best and the worst of them.  If there is a way to make them worth their keep, he knows it.  If his cow generously gives twelve quarts of milk and we can use but two, it is no concern of ours what becomes of the other ten.

For the country dweller, who feels that life is not complete without livestock of some sort and follows that by acquiring a barnyard menagerie, we would recommend that he enter upon his course cautiously.  This is assuming that he knows little or nothing of farming either by theory or practice.  If, on the other hand, he has been reared on a farm, he understands perfectly how to care for the various animals and the labor entailed in doing so.  He is in no need of any admonition from us, and who are we to offer it?  But for the average person who is just beginning his experiment in country living, a few chickens are suggested for the initial attempt.  There are two ways to embark on this.  With either, it is well to subscribe to a good farm journal.  Consult that or the farmer down the road as to breed.  As rank outsiders we suggest a well established and hardy kind.

Then, the easiest way for the novice would probably be to buy full-grown chickens that are just beginning to lay.  They are old enough to know their way about and any dry, well ventilated shelter that is proof against thieving skunks, weasels and similar wild life, will be adequate for them along with a chicken run with a high enough fence to keep them within bounds.  For this type of fowl is no respecter of property.  Not only does it take delight in working havoc with its owner’s flower beds and borders but those of his neighbor as well.