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This summer 22 of our neighbor’s adolescent angus steers broke through a fence, and half of them were never recaptured. During their cross-country wanderings the tamer half frequently visited our house site, poked around outside our garden fence, and drank from the river at our crossing. One afternoon as we and a few other neighbors stood by the road talking with the cattle owner, I wondered aloud how we might lure the cattle into our field that borders his, then draw them toward the gate in the fence. “What do they really like? What can’t they resist?” I asked. “Salt. They’re salt-hungry.” On somebody’s land over near Scott Hollow Road, he told us, the steers had found the site of an old salt lick in the woods and dug a big hole around it. “Why don’t we get a salt lick, put it near the gate, and when they come—” The neighbor interrupted me, shaking his head. “Then all the steers inside the fence will get out, too.” Nothing we did or said could help our neighbor. Later I heard he ended up hiring a couple of expensive cowboys from Oklahoma to corral the less-skittish steers onto a truck and wrote off the remainder as a business loss. Meanwhile, the idea of “salt-hungry” stuck with me. It turns out that most animals, especially the herbivores, including deer, moose, elk, sheep, goats, and elephants, are often salt-hungry. In cervids, for example, salt is vital to facilitating antler growth in males and lactation in females. Rabbits, porcupine, rats, and fox are also known to get salt-hungry. As are birds, especially those that subsist on seeds. The better question might be, which animals aren’t salt-hungry? And why does anyone care? Road salt is one reason. It attracts salt-hungry animals, and while they stand there licking the pavement, they’re hazards to themselves and drivers. But for us, months after the neighbor’s steers went to market, the phenomenon of salt-hungry animals has become personal, perhaps problematic. For the window and door trim on our house-in-progress, we decided to splurge and use redwood, so that we could match the redwood fascia made from reclaimed siding we’d purchased at the Minneapolis ReUse Center. After some research we found that the most reasonably priced reclaimed redwood (outside of the ReUse Center, which had no more) was at Duluth Timber Company. Theirs comes from the staves used in enormous, old pickle and wine vats. The staves are about 3” deep, 6” wide, and range from 8’ to 16’ long, depending on the type of vat. Cut down the middle and sliced a bit narrower, these were the right size for our trim. Recently D. attached the boards around the windows on the second floor. But he noticed something odd about them—some of the faces were dappled with sparkling, white flecks. 
Curious about the flecks, he licked a board. (And now I’m especially glad we chose not to buy those strychnine vat staves). Yes, it’s salt. We got the pickle barrel staves—redwood steeped in brine for almost a century. Of course we’ll coat the trim with some kind of weather-resistant sealant. But will the animals still smell the salt? Will we peer out the window in March to face a buck licking our house? Okay, licking might not be so bad. And if the neighbor’s steers get loose next summer, our place will be the big lure, the obvious meeting point, making the runaways easier to catch. But we’ll be disappointed if porcupine and mice chew off pieces of our house. Even worse, if they do gnaw on the trim, the problem, according to Plutarch, might only compound. In his Symposiacs, he writes: “Salt, in the opinion of some men, […] is very operative that way; and those that breed dogs, when they find their bitches not apt to be hot, give them salt and seasoned flesh, to excite and arouse their sleeping lechery and vigor. Besides, the ships that carry salt breed abundance of mice; the females, as some imagine, conceiving without the help of the males, only by licking the salt. But it is most probable that the salt raiseth an itching in animals, and so makes them salacious and eager to couple.” If only we’d gotten the wine barrel staves. |
