Manure vs. Compost

I've been thinking about a few of my daily tasks and how parts of them are different. We have some cats, a few dogs, some laying hens and even a friendly duck. The duck has it's own friend, our disabled hen and they wander separately from the other laying hens. As you might guess with so many animals we have to deal with the issue of manure. Generally I deal with the manure and what happens with it. It certainly is no fun to walk out into the back yard and step in a pile or slip on a gooey mess from the duck and chicken friendship.

I was pondering the differences between the manure from each of the different animals, and how I handle each. It hit me that this task is like life. The cats mostly use a litter box and the dogs use a few areas outside. We dispose of them in the trash. The chickens and duck go in areas within their runs and that gets raked up or shoveled and put into the compost pile to decompose. One is waste and the other is fertilizer. One is a problem and one helps grow food. Kind of like life, you have to learn to separate the good from the not so good.