While I know that Nature abhors a vacuum and that removing one predator just frees up a territory for another to move in, I think that some people forget that predatory animals are no more automatically interchangeable than are human beings...they're all individuals and their past experiences with humans in general may well colour how they're going to relate to YOU and YOUR territory once they start living next door to you, as it were. Right now, we've got a nuisance fox in the neighbourhood because some jackasses down the road thought it was cute to 'tame' it by feeding it and it's largely lost its fear of humans as a result. No big deal to me...I've got fencing and lock up my gang at night. Not so great for the woman who's got silkies a few houses over and who let them out to forage a bit in her backyard while she stayed with them...only to watch said fox race in and snatch one of her pullets even though she was standing right there! Now that's bold! I'm seriously thinking of getting rid of this animal now instead of just toying with the idea for her sake--the one good thing about tame predators is that they become much easier to catch and I know this fox will visit my yard if I leave the front gate open at night--and expect that the poor woman will then at least have some reprieve once a more suitably wary fox inclined to run from humans rather than approaching them for a handout moves in. Well...she'll have some relief until the jackasses no doubt try to tame the new one too. Oh well, this is why I have seven traps in total and snares a-plenty.
The best fox neighbours in the world are the ones who've had their backsides peppered with light bird shot a few times and their muzzles zapped with a heavy-duty jolt of electrical perimeter fencing. Even if it happened elsewhere, they usually carry the experiences with them wherever they go and avoid people like the plague and will make a wide detour around your yard, at least during the daytime when humans are likely to be about. That's the sort of predator I like to see move in. Of course, all bets are off if an animal gets truly desperate for food, but as long as the wild foraging's good and plentiful, I suspect most normal, unhabituated critters would just as soon avoid you and do their own thing.
I also wonder if a certain degree of what might be termed animal culture doesn't sometimes factor into our clashes with predators. This came up for me in a thread about ravens a while back...someone was having trouble with ravens attacking their adult chickens. This was news to me--I knew they went after chicks, but adults?--and wondered afterwards if this wasn't a learned behaviour, with parents or even just one parent who'd been successful at killing an adult chicken in the past, teaching their resultant young that those big slow feathery things that roamed around on the ground in people's yards were actually viable prey one could have a go at as long as those pesky humans weren't around. Personally, I've never heard of anyone locally losing a large chicken to a raven, but that may only be because no raven has ever tried to kill one yet...at least, again, not locally. The closest I've seen is the local crows teaching their kids to hunt juvenile starlings freshly out of the nest. And garbage, they teach the youngsters how to tear open garbage bags and discover the hidden treasures inside every Friday morning when there's a scheduled garbage pickup. This CAN'T be innate normal crow behaviour. What crow living away from people and where they visit ever sees a black garbage bag? But raiding the garbage and hunting fledglings is normal behaviour for MY crows because it's being passed on from one generation to the next. Hopefully, I'll never get a raven who's learned about killing adult chickens moving into the neighbourhood because then my flock will be in trouble. I've got a LOT of ravens, and the new generation's out of the nest right now!
No new raccoons around to bug me either. Have others moved into the territorial slots I opened up when I took out those 10+ coons last year and that sad injured one earlier this spring? Oh, I'm sure they have. But none so far have demonstrated that they've learned to raid bird feeders or know how to tear their way into a chicken run...whoever replaced last year's varmints is keeping their distance...so far. This is just another example of why I never let the thought of new predators moving in as fast as I dispatch the old deter me. The new ones might be a lot warier or already have reason to fear people or maybe they'll need a long learning curve before they become bona fide nuisance predators. Heck, I don't even mind the red squirrels that are raiding my sunflower seed feeders right now. They are only two of them, they're both males, and they only come up from their respective patches of woods once a day towards evening to grab some seeds and then promptly return home. 'Pests' like this I don't mind. It's the ones that hang around ALL DAY LONG and who run around on your house and outbuildings looking to chew holes and move in that I get the traps out for!
Anyway, like I said, I believe that there are dangerous nuisance predators and then there are bearable predators. I think it's worth taking out the dangerous ones on the off chance that their replacements will be of the more bearable variety.
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. I'm proud of what I built, I took an entire winter studying and critiquing other's designs. I finally decided on copying the Wichita coop. My design is reverse of the coop on this site. My girls love it!, It's easy to clean and I have 3 egg boxes for 6 hens. I'm very proud of my accomplishment! Thanks
