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Monday, June 14, 2010

I have uncovered the breeding grounds of the SCRAP TIRES!

They are extremely sneaky creatures, but my eradication mission is surging forward with great success.


Here we observe five magnificent adult tires in a resting position.  More accurately, four decent specimens and one gnarly individual which the others appear to be protecting.


On closer inspection, they are all well past their prime.  There will be no mercy shown them when I cull this herd!!  (The lone tire on the ground is actually a domesticated tire which is used as a bumper guard on the tractor.  Best if you don't ask, or second guess my counting skills.)

Once the tires have been removed from their rims, they will be loaded into my truck and shipped off to the place where junk tires go.  TO DIE.

Where do they all come from?  This is the question I'm regularly asked.  Even the guys at the disposal, the guys who know my dog on a first name basis, have asked me where all these tires come from.  Well there is really only one explanation, one which until last week was merely a theory and has now been proven.


They find their way into the long grass and MULTIPLY!  It's the only explanation that makes sense.  To keep the tire numbers down, the males and females would have to be carefully separated.

Clearly, for the past five or twenty years or so, the males and females have not been carefully separated at the Old Homestead.

The problem, however, is that the genders are incredibly difficult to tell apart.

Mike the Vet brought over a load of hay for us on the weekend.  (It's gotta be good hay if I buy it from the vet, right?)  As it turns out, Mike the Vet has had a small problem with pickup trucks breeding behind his barn.  But that's another story, another zoomophological expedition, another blog post.

Anyways.  We asked Mike the Vet how best to tell the males from the females, in order to keep the population down.  It doesn't really matter, since I fully intend to ERADICATE THE ENTIRE HERD but I was curious.

"Oh it's simple," he said.  "The females have a big hole in the middle."








I suspect Mike the Vet could be yankin' my chain here.


Tire reproduction appears to be a mystery.  I am working on a new theory that paired tires are not even necessary to create new ones.  Maybe it takes multiples of two, as pictured, which suggests that tires are not very choosy and do not mate for life.  I generally lean towards my first theory: tires do that asexual or whatever it is thing, like worms.


I'm pretty sure I'm right about this.  One tire left under a tree can sprout into three tires in less than a year.


My ol' man made a discovery in the bottom of the yard the other day.  He was weedwhacking, because I do NOT do any weedwhacking, what with it being loud, and with my hatred for the exhaust from stupid little engines. As he was trimming the long grass, he came across a nest of small tires!


Ha!  We've got them now!  Totally unfazed by their small size and diminutive cuteness, we moved them to a location more easily accessible by pickup truck.  




They will be taken off to the disposal yard before they mature and have a chance to spawn more!!

Don't look at me like that - it's not cruel.  They are not an endangered species.  At least not around here.

But they will be soon, as I continue on with my quest to make the Old Homestead into an Tire-Free zone.  After this, any strays will have to move on to a Wild Tire Sanctuary if they know what's good for them.

11 comments:

Unknown said...

Alls I'm saying is you might not want to let pallets lurk about necking at the edges of your wooded property either. They, apparently, also multiply like crazy.

Unknown said...

We dont have a tire breeding program, we have a rock breeding program. Good thing I made a stone boat and taught Indigo how to pull it last week.

Heidi the Hick said...

PALLETS! They are worse than RABBITS!

We got a big pallet pile cleared out and I am sure the other pile got bigger while our backs were turned. Coincidentally there was a guy standing there with a chainsaw surrounded by little pallets. Hmmmm.

Sydney, when I was a kid we had to pick rocks out of the field. Y'know, back in the 30s. Haha. Put the tractor in 1st gear, let it chug along in a straight line, put rocks in your pail and dump it into the wagon when it gets heavy. Good times.

If we could like, sell pet rocks off our breeding programs we'd do pretty well for ourselves.

Paul Tee said...

Contrary to popular belief, most tires are not gender specific. The American Tire Associations estimates that only 2 % of the tires manufactured in the continental United States have the capability of reproducing themselves. Originally it was not an indigenous breed, native to our shores, but imports that have proliferated without the usual controls. These tires, have no natural predators to keep them in check. Unfortunately as these imports masquerade as knockoffs of well-known local brands there are extremely hard to spot. They sometimes sport an extremely aggressive tread, but the most sure way of identifying them is from the foreign patterning of their mold anchors. The little knubblets have an asynchronous layout.

As for the male-female determination, your vet is wrong, based upon the big hole in the middle, they all have THAT. Short of DNA profiling, the most secure way of telling the sexes apart is through behavioural observations (i.e., is there an inner tube or not? The size of the valve is also a consideration, the male tends to exhibit a more prone member, which is also a functional as well as aesthetic determinant. It's rare to find a female off the rim, showing the usual dependence of the sex--although in their golden years this is no longer necessarily true. Also patterns of dominance is an important indicator. Looking at your pictures, I suspect that the uppermost tires in the heaps could be males of the species and need to be watched closely. They retain their sexual prowess even in their later years, so don't be fooled by their decrepit appearance.

The only saving grace is that the offspring of these tires are incapable of further reproduction.

The American government and the tire industry are trying desperately to cap these incursions into the local markets, but it is feared that continued erosion of the racial purity of local manufacture will continue unabated. There is sporadic talk of a stimulus package, but to this day, it remains as wholly unsubstantiated gossip.

Heidi Willis said...

Heidi - you are hilarious!!

And, as far as I can tell from this blog lately... extremely hard working!

I'm gonna want to see arm-muscle photos pretty soon.

Olly said...

Great post! I laughed about the weed wacker. Our evil weed wacker and I have come to an understanding. If I don't touch it, there is a much better chance it won't be reduced to small pieces by me driving over it repeatedly. Yeah...my husband does that job now. I'll stick to using the lawn mower. It knows I'm the boss.

Biddie said...

I should take a tire to make into a swing for the backyard. Do you have any big enough for my ass??
I guess that I would need a female then. I wouldn't want to put my bum somewhere that I shouldn't :)
Man, you are hard working! Yer gonna have the ole homestead looking like a botannical garden.

Heidi the Hick said...

Biddie if you want a tire... I still got some! I'll carefully observe it first of course, to avoid nasty situations. You'll still recognize the place. It'll just have more open space. Then we'll all be debating what to do with it. Pool! Pasture! Mountain bike obstacle course! Pugstacle course! Garden! Farm implement parking!

UNICORN SUNFLOWER PATCH!

Olly, I must do a post on Equipment I Refuse to Operate. Thanks for the idea! Gotta watch those ornery weedwhackers.

Heidi, I gotta laugh cuz I'm too worn out to do anything else! I actually think I should be a heck of a lot more buff than I'm turning out. What's that all about? By now I should be lifting cars by the front bumper. I need a nap.

Paul!!! I KNEW IT! I KNEW Mike The Vet was puttin' me on! That joker!

Your exhaustive research will be EXTREMELY HELPFUL! I am so glad you wrote it all up for me. As soon as I can, I'll hide in a tree and and observe the tire behaviours. They're actually pretty lazy.

Like alligators in a nuclear waste swamp.

I think I should go to sleep now.

Paul Tee said...

Heidi they are NOT lazy just have a different time sense from us.

I greatly admire your camera work; again I can count every blade of grass, every pebble. WOW! It is as if I'm there.

Your tires remind me that I used to have a great big inner tube from the back wheel of a tractor to float upon on my pond on a hot summer day, just watching the clouds roll by. The pond has silted up since, and algea turned it into peasoup. Alas.

A thought though. What will you do once all the work is done? When there is not one scrap to be found? the barn spotless? the grass mowed? horses tended? dog groomed and ready? What will you do then?

Heidi the Hick said...

Dad asked me the same thing.

I said I'll ride my horses.

And when both horses have been ridden twice in one day I believe I will take a nap.

Of course there are those two novels I started.

Got a feeling I will never ever ever run out of things to do. !!!!!

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