Everybody looks at the world through the window of their own needs and experience. When I say everybody, that includes me. That's not a bad thing, it's just the way things are. We learn from what we see and experience.
We have different needs, depending on environment and what we are doing. If your livelihood depends on producing the maximum possible number of birds in a year, your needs are very different from the person producing meat only for their own household. If you have to satisfy what your customers want, that will be different than only satisfying yourself.
Bossroo, it sounds like you have an incredibly hostile environment to deal with, and have done so for many years. I can see why you have the opinions that you do. Most of us don't have to deal with such extremes, and I, for one, am grateful that my own environment is so much easier than that.
I seldom lose a bird to a predator. They run free most days, and are closed up at night. During the last year, I've only lost 2 chickens to predation, one was one of my own puppies when they hadn't quite caught on to the birds being off-limits, (they get it now, so it's no longer a problem) and one was a to neighbor's puppy that got out. I lost 3 that got hit by cars. Prior to this year, I'd only lost one to a car in the previous 9 years, so this was an unusual year for traffic losses. So the mental image you have of free-range birds being constantly under stress from being chased by predators, isn't accurate here. Many places are relatively safe for free-range fowl. Other places, like where you live, are not.
I don't know why I have so few problems with predators, they are in the area. I hear coyotes at night all the time. We have raccoons. Opossums, (which my dog Cleo has evicted from the hen house on occasion) that have never attacked my chickens, even when one was locked in with them by accident. I have barred owls all around here. I know there are some larger owls in the area, and an occasional bobcat, my neighbor's had footage of them from his deer cam.
The first year we lived here, we had some losses to raccoons, until we built a new coop. None since. That wasn't free-range losses, though, the raccoons broke into the coop at night. Two separate years, we had fox trouble, until the fox was killed, the first by my DH, the 2nd, (who showed up 2 or 3 years later) was first wounded by Cleo the Dog, then shot by a neighbor down the road.
So we've had it pretty easy, predator-wise, losses have been few and far between.
For your situation, Cornish X are just the ticket. For mine, not so much!
