Out Foxing the Foxes

I was listening to the radio yesterday and I heard a discussion about how the food critic, who was being interviewed, had suffered a devastating raid in his backyard chicken coop in which all of his precious laying hens had been killed, evidently by a fox.
The discussion prompted a deluge of SMS messages and calls to the show with suggestions for how to keep a fox or other predators out of the chicken coop, some practical, some old wives tales and some, downright daft!

The method favoured by the owner of the coop in question was to use small pieces of lead, placed strategically behind one of the foxes ears.
This of course was a sarcastic reference to using a shotgun to kill the fox!

Killing the fox though, is a short term solution to a long term problem as there are many more foxes to take the place of the one you have killed and you will be kept very busy standing guard over your chicken coop 24 hours a day. Sooner or later, the fox will outsmart you. The title 'sly as a fox' is one that's well deserved when it comes to these particular predators.

Personally I dont favour punishing an animal with death for simply doing what comes naturally and for something thats essential to its own survival. Can you imagine looking hungrily through the store window at all the lovely food inside and being shot for walking through the door?

There are lots of different ways of keeping predators away from your chicken coop, some more effective than others.

Some of these include-

• tying a clump of human hair to the chicken coop to introduce the scent of humans
• Allowing the family dog to frequent the area around the chicken coop to introduce the dogs scent and therefore scare off the foxes
• Using modern infra red laser devices which attach to the coop and ward off intruders using pulsating beams of light only visible to animals
• using electric fences and wires similar to the devices used for keeping cattle in.
• Urinating in the area around the coop!  once again to introduce the scent of humans

Obviously some of these methods are less favourable than others and some of them clearly have health and safety issues. Others are just disgusting!

You would have to wonder also if the methods designed to induce fear in your predators, are not also inducing fear in your chickens!

Of course, there is one old saying that is definitely true, 'prevention is better than cure', so in the case of preventing your chickens from being killed it would make sense to build a properly constructed chicken coop to keep your hens safe and stop the foxes getting inside in the first place.

Can Chickens Feel Emotional Distress?

Do chickens and other animals such as cats and dogs have emotions and feelings in the same way as humans do? This is a question people have been asking for centuries and a recent study by The Royal Society gives some insight into this age old question.
I doubt if anyone keeping chickens has given this much thought but anyone that has a cat or dog has probably wondered at some stage about what their pet is thinking when they look adoringly into their owners eyes and sigh loudly as they are having their bellies scratched. Or if they sit by the door and pine for hours waiting for their owners to return after a days work.
Of course, who wouldnt agree that dogs in particular are intelligent animals at some level and regularly demonstrate this in the clever tricks they do and the sometimes remarkable feats dogs have been known to perform on occassion.
But when we are asked to believe a chicken has emotion or a capacity for empathy we could be forgiven for thinking its a step too far, or could we?

A study just published by the Royal Society B: Biological sciences appears to prove that chickens, of all creatures, feel distress and emotional pain just like we do when their young chicks or even their coop-mates are hurt or distressed.

Scientists discovered that when a group of young chicks were caused various levels of 'distress' by directing puffs of air at them for brief periods the mother hen showed signs of distress in response to this in the form of higher levels of alertness, decreased preening activity, increased heart rate and increased vocalisation among other various indicators.
The results of the study, they say, prove positively that adult chickens posses some form of empathy, however primitive it may be.

So if your a chicken keeper or plan on keeping chickens at home at some stage you might want to bear this in mind when taking care of your flock!