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Wasnt there a song about the Circle of Life, or something like that?
One must remember that wild or feral creatures have but a few things on their mind: Food and breeding.
They are very determined in these things. If you've never seen the havoc a dog can wreak on a fence, you just dont know.
Deterrents are can help save your chickens from predation. Things like electric fences are just one method you can use to deter predators. But the better, ultimate goal is to make predators avoid your place altogether, not just linger around the chicken fence drooling, waiting for an opportune moment.
Let me share something with you inspired by our friend, Bob Plamondon (
www.plamondon.com). His problem this time was crows. They were robbing his nests and eating all the eggs!
"Maybe trickery and deterrents work if predators have a lot of equally good places to go. Suppose everyone in the neighborhood has ripe cornfields, but only ONE field had scarecrows. The crows might leave that one field alone -- since there are plenty more fields to choose from.
But when you are one of the only people around running a 24-hour egg buffet, what then?
I'll tell you what worked for me - shooting them. After shooting two crows on my main pasture, they've kept away. The back pasture has fewer crows but is still something of a problem, since it's much harder for me to sneak up on them over there.
Boring solutions work; colorful ones don't. This is my usual exerience. People love colorful solutions because they make a great story, and they'll repeat the story to other people even if they dont know for certain that it works.
Simple, direct, unaesthetic solutions, like shooting predators, have nothing going for them except that they DO work. But, they don't get repeated so much because they're not very interesting to a general audience.
Okay, so how does this apply to predators? One of those things not often recognized about predators is that they are both smart and observant. It's what allows them to prey, after all, as opposed to simply go about grazing. I rarely hear people mention this, but predators are smarter and more observant than people give them credit for.
Now that I've killed two crows, at least a hundred are avoiding my farm. I've seen the same effect with four-footed predators: when the farmers and the district trapper are on their toes about livestock-eaters, the predators not only get the message, they pass it on to their young, and a balance is struck.
The predators go about thier business of eating wildlife rather than livestock, and so both predators and livestock get to have a normal
lifespan. But if you don't kill any predators, their caution fades.
After a couple of generations, the mothers stop teaching farm-avoidance to their young, and then the clueless young predators
kill a lot of livestock before inevitably being killed themselves."
Employ deterrents, by all means. They should be a part of a layered scheme of defense. But often enough, in our rush to be humane, or "nice," we fail in our responsibilities to those creatures which we have stewardship over.
The answer to the predator problem is often far simpler than we allow it to be. In essence, "The best defense is a good offense."
