Bantam Orps....how high should my fence be?

[shelleyb1969]

Hi everyone. How high should a fence be for orpington bantams? I'm not going to be covering the top of the run, so I don't want them to fly out (which I'm sure I'll have some that will try!). Until my faithful barn cat passes away

, I won't be able to let them out to free range. So for now, a run will have to do.

 

[RyanAndMeri]

Maybe you wont need to keep them penned up... I guess it depends on your cat.

We have way too many cats. We have 4 saimese cats inside the house and when hatching/raising chickens we have them inside the house as well and the cats leave them be. For example:

Outside of the house we have buff orps, mille fleur bantams, baby orps (well 2 months old), and a friendly black sumatra roo all running around our yard without any incident from the neighborhood cats. We have 3 tom cats that hang out in our yard, a momma cat and 3 of her babies that have made our yard their home. We took one scrappy tom to the pound though (he fought a lot of the other cats and was nasty towards us.) At first when we brought the chickens out into the yard we noticed a young stray would charge, tackle, and flee from our buff hens. Since he was a young cat I figured it was sport. But still, we were concerned and kept the chickens penned up anyway. One day we noticed the cats were so hungry they would sneak into the daytime run and eat the chicken food off the ground! We felt bad for the strays so we put some food out and they stopped bothering our chickens completely. Even with 1 month old chicks running around the yard the strays don't bother them and there are no more football tackles going on. Now we have to keep the chickens away from the cat food because now THEY harass the cats for the goodies

. It's quite a funny thing to watch; we have to put the cat food up on some blocks away from the orp's. Silly chickens.

Regarding our run - the fence is only 4 feet high and our milles and black sumatra easily get out of the pen. We were going to cover it but we haven't seen a need too yet since the cats aren't a problem like we originally expected.

 

[herechickchick]

My standard Orpingtons would roost on my 6' fence, if that helps.