how do i stop my chickens from going into the road?

[The_Silver_Warrior]

hi the other day we were driving down my street and i saw my Plymouth rock running away from a car so i got out of my car and got her i have an acre for my choocks and a split rail fence soo how do i stop my chickens from going into the street?! pleas help cant stand it if one gets hurt.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

Confine your chickens or buy and move the road.
It is natural and usual for a chicken to cross the road.
They are only trying to prove to the local possums that the road can be safely crossed.

 

[SniperGoose]

There's no way for you to stop them from wandering unless you have them in some sort of an enclosure. All my girls are in a 1 acre fenced off portion of land right behind our yard, and they are perfectly content. I'm assuming you let them free range then? Honestly, when you free range, it's just a matter of time till they get killed. I've been there, done that. That's what made me make an enclosure for them in the first place; so I wouldn't lose anymore of my chickens.

 

[FlyWheel]

Confine your chickens or buy and move the road.
It is natural and usual for a chicken to cross the road.
They are only trying to prove to the local possums that the road can be safely crossed.

 

[sourland]

"Good fences make good neighbors." They also make safe chickens.

 

[MissChick@dee]

hi the other day we were driving down my street and i saw my Plymouth rock running away from a car so i got out of my car and got her i have an acre for my choocks and a split rail fence soo how do i stop my chickens from going into the street?! pleas help cant stand it if one gets hurt.

A real fence?

 

[Fishkeeper]

Keep them in a safe run. They'll be vastly safer, from cars and from predators, in a run, and you can keep them happy and enriched by adding lawn clippings, weeds, veggies, scraps, and other things to scratch around and play in. If you can get them on a solid recall, i.e. they'll come to you whenever you call, you can let them out for supervised free-range time. Otherwise, as you live near a road, you should keep them penned up. Not only is the road a danger to them, they're a danger to drivers- if one jumps up when a car approaches and ends up splayed across the windshield, it could block someone's view and they could crash, or they could swerve to miss the chickens and crash.

 

[EggWalrus]

You could put up several strands of electric poly fence on the split rail. Go up six inches from ground, then every six or so inches, filing in the space between rails. Run a strand across the top of the fence also.
You don't need a big fancy shock box for it to work.
Or you can buy a cheap $29 box and put up about 3 or 4 strands of poly around a small area you can train the chickens in. The can see the poly wire and will get a little zap when they touch it. Within a few days, you couldn't bribe them to touch it. After that you can just put a single strand of poly between your yard and the road, they shouldn't go near it again.
That's how I broke mine from getting in the road.

 

[Aunt Angus]

I find this an interesting topic. My pullets are in an enclosed yard with a 6 ft privacy fence all around. However, I live in an area where many people have chickens and free range them exclusively. I see them all the time in ditches next to the road or on the shoulder. But I have never ever ever seen a chicken carcass in the road. Ducks? Yes. Rabbits? You bet. And skunks and opossum and cats. But never a chicken in all the decades I have driven up and down the main thoroughfare. They seem to stay out of the road. I wouldn't trust my doofy little pullets to be out there, but other people's chickens seem to have it figured out. Is it learned behavior from mama hens who learned from mama hens and so on? Who knows? Maybe they know how crazy Sacramento drivers are.

And there was the I-5 rooster. For years, a rooster lived in the median of Interstate 5 near the Sacramento airport. I'd see him every morning on the way to work. I-5 is a super busy freeway. But he stayed out of traffic. Weird....