I'd have to walk a mile or more .Any closer than at and the goats and wild birds would eat the dog food . Great Pyrenees dogs have solved pretty much all my predator problems . Finest thing in the world to see them chase a buzzard or hawk across the field . My neighbor will put his dead cows close to our fence and cover them with brush . My dogs bring them home one piece at a time The longer I have the dogs the more impressed I am with them. I swear they won't hurt a living thing . However anything dead is fair game . Wife commented the other day how she hadn't heard the coyote packs howl as much . Seems like they have moved further away from our place since the dogs came here .I have a friend who lives five miles away as the crow flies . He is at his wits end . Get chickens something kills them . Now something is killing his calves.I figure its coyotes Hoping to take him some cable snares and show him how to set a snare trap. To wait a year for a calf and have varmints kill it . Well it just isn't an easy thing to take . I'm a diehard try to make a profit farmer , so is he . I've been dealing with loose dogs and foxes and now coyotes . Coons and possums even skunks that can wipeout a beehive in no time at all .Just eat the bees when they come out Some of us my seem hard on the subject of predators. If you ever found one of your goats, where coyotes have run it into a fence and ripped it's belly open. Or clean up after a coon has beheaded a whole cage full of nice young pullets . Well it just makes you have a different attitude about varmints .I hate killing even what needs killing . Once they get a taste for fresh blood . There just isn't any other way .Every raccoon situation is different, but I've learned to feed them in the woods (they love dry dogfood) before they get to my pen (I know, you're not supposed to feed wildlife but conclude if I don't they're more likely to go after a bird). They also come during the day for feed while the birds are out of the house or free-ranging, but have never shown an interest in a chicken if there's other food available. I'm meticulous about personally counting & locking the birds up at night as opossums are worse than raccoons. So far, of 10 birds I have never lost one to a raccoon, but have lost 5 to hawks. I know of no cure for raccoons since when one is taken care of more move in, so rather than fight them I've found it easier to co-exist by giving them what they want. Important, however, to know when one is rabid & to avoid, or dispose, of those, but in 7 years of chickens I've never had a rabid raccoon.