For the vast majority of us, as long as the coop is tight and no predator can get in or reach in, the addition of an electric fence hung on the coop itself is probably not needed. On my Woods coop, my assumption is I have all manner of predators outside the coop at night.......valid as I have pictures of them taken by game cameras. They are also nightly visitors in the adjacent horse barn where they steal any food the cats failed to cleanup. Yet they do not.......cannot....get into the chicken house to harm the birds. That is at night. By day, the birds are yarded inside a yard/garden area that allows each bird in excess of 3,000 SF each. Plenty of room to roam about, play, peck, scratch and get into stuff. That yard area is surrounded by / protected by my 4 wire fence system. In well over a year, I have yet to see one single varmint inside the fence during the day when the birds are out and about. Only predator I've seen test it during the day was the neighbor's dog and it got popped pretty hard. I have since seen it out when the birds were in full view and it ignores them. So birds are allowed to roam at will inside a confined yard. NOT free ranged. In my view, a flock of birds that are truly free ranged.....no confinement and no protection........are an open buffet..........free for the taking......and it is only a matter of time until something does.
So if you want to deter predators, use this two prong system. Tight coop that nothing can get into at night, surrounded by an electric fence that protects day and night. That way you.......and the birds........can rest easy at night, knowing no harm is going to come to them.
My avatar shows the classic cartoon of a chicken farmer wielding a double barrel shotgun (yes I have one of those) confronting a varmint coming out of the house with a bird under each arm. Caption says......."it doesn't have to be like this". It doesn't have to be like that either. Any strategy to protect the birds that required me to get up to go racing into the night to shoot a predator would never work.
