Foxes from HELL

[Tala]

Another vote for the e-fence.

I haven't fried a fox yet, but I think every dog in the neighborhood is a believer

Ground it real good and the rest is cake.

 

[TomKat]

Another vote for an electric fence plus a dog or two. We have foxes, raccoons and coyotes that wander across our property. If you keep the wire close to the ground they'll get a shock when they start to tunnel. So far no chicken casualties, although I did hear a coyote yelp a few weeks ago.

 

[Bear Foot Farm]

Burying wire is a huge waste of effort. Just lay it flat on the ground around the pen and cover it with a little dirt.
Dont use "chicken wire". Use welded wire instead and make it at least 2 ft wide.

Add a section at the top of the fence at least a ft wide that angles out at about 45 degrees to stop them from climbing over

Do NOT get a LGD if all you have is a few chickens.
LGD's need to be fenced in a large area will cause more problems than they are worth if you try to make them a "yard dog"
Any good "Pound Hound" will keep foxes away, and will make a much better pet

 

[lngrid]

Hi there.
My best friend's husband was raised on a chicken ranch for 18 years. He and his wife have 3/4 of an acre just a few yards from a creek/urban greenspace area. I don't know about foxes, but they have opossums, skunks and racoons for sure.

When they began keeping chickens he built the coop on a concrete pad. They only let their chickens free range under supervision. They built a very large run. He used a mower-sized mini tractor with a digging attachment to make a trench 2 feet deep and buried 1/2" hardware cloth that far down. It extends up to become the run fence which is held to a frame made of 2 X 4s braced to each other with those metal joiner things (haha. I'm no carpenter!). The fence is 7' high and is topped on the outside, so climbers will touch it before getting to the inside, with a hot electric wire. It runs insulated up one of the posts and is held out from the fence proper about 6 inches by arms that tilt down and outward from the top fence rail. Under the ground for a couple of feet outside the doorway and for a foot inside it he buried many lengths of barbed wire running parallel to the fence and about 1 foot longer than the doorway on each side. They're buried about 3 inches below the surface of the soil. Instead of rat-proofing the coop he stores the food in metal containers. I don't know what, if anything, he does about rat-proofing the feeders. He also has wires stretched across the run, from fencetop to fencetop and hangs CDs and mylar strips to keep hawks away.

I read about a man who would get the old, sweet-tasting antifreeze and use a syringe to inject it into hotdogs. He would squirt in as much as they could hold, then he would pour it all over them like a sauce. He would leave it out at night for the predators to snack on. He said he killed a lot this way, but I don't know if you can get that kind of antifreeze anymore.

They haven't had much trouble with predators so far. I hope you have better luck with your chicken. You've gone through enough expense and heartache already.

 

[twentynine]

You do not have to kill predators, all you have to do is keep them out of your chicken coop.

Rebar driven in the groung at 3 or 4 inch spacing, expensive and time consuming and not totaly foolproof.

Glass burried in the ground to prevent digging. I do not believe that to be anything but a slight deterant. A truly hungry pred will not back away from a little glass.

Poisoning with antifreeze. I don't even want to use the language appropriate to describe that individual. But it would be a lot of four letter words.

Even for a large coop/run an electric fence could be run for under 100 dollars. If no electricity is available in the area a solar powered charger can be had for slightly more money.

With rebar costing as much as 10 dollars for a 20 foot piece, electric fencing would be way cheaper. Plus a whole lot less labor to install.

 

[Kyah]

Sorry about your hens. I know how that feels.

We have a lot of predators here, and I learned (the hard way) that I have to make my coop extra secure. As much as I'd love to, I cannot even let my hens out to free range at all.

My coop is a remodeled tack room from when we had horses. It's attached to the barn, but up off the ground, so animals can't tunnel in. The outside pen has dog kennel fencing. For the chickens to go outside, they have to fly up to the window sill, and then down to the ground outside.

A predator would have a very hard time to jump up to the window, and we close the window at night, just in case.

Hungry animals can be extremely resourceful and very strong. If there's the slightest weakness in a coop or a run, they'll usually find it.

-Kyah

 

[joebryant]

Yesterday morning I was sitting here minding my own business, just drinking a cup of coffee, when the two corgis started barking while trying to get through the windows that go down to the floor. I looked out and saw two deer down by the pond. I told the dogs to shut up, but they just kept barking. I looked closer at the field (drowsy eyes) and also saw two foxes in the field. I let the dogs out into the back yard fenced in), they flew out the door barking like two hyenas and the foxes ran off. Luckily none of my chickens have been free ranging for about a month. They're not in the coops (see my BYC page); they're all in the 12'X24' sectioned off area in the barn for the winter. We've been seeing the foxes for several weeks. If I had a gun, I'd shoot them.

 

[millebantam]

I can't for the life of me understand why some people go through all the intensive labor of burying wire vertically underground to repel digging predators. If you simply "skirt" the wire flat on the ground, hog ringed to the bottom wire, it is impenetrable. Predators can be quite clever, but none of them will be clever enough to start digging their hole 2 feet or more away from the pen.







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[Camelot Farms]

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Ugh! We lost all of our Quail except 2, to rats this week. Didnt even know we had rats...we have 4 cats who are now on probation for slacking... DH ended up putting poison in a small box that only rats could get into and we have been finding bodies all week. Apparently mama had a nest...ugh!

Back to your regularly scheduled fox thread....

Fox are conniving little boogers. We finally had to let the dogs out after them.

 

[Camelot Farms]

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This is what we did also. Used hardware cloth, laid dirt and grass seed over it and now you dont even know its there!