Relocate or Retaliate?

[lengel]

Just my two cents.

I haven't done any kind of research so this is based on my experience only.

We can't trap a raccoon to save ourselves in spite of the fact that they mate in the tree next to the house. There is however a pond out back and we have a huge frog population in any given year.

We have four dogs and the neighbors tell us that they haven't seen coyotes, "coy-dogs" or raccoons since we (our dogs) showed up. I regularly take our dogs out to pee around the poultry enclosures but I didn't realize that this would be quite so important until now.

The three predators who have killed our birds are: the dog from a house two miles away because his owners are idiots, a fisher cat who beheaded exactly one of our hens and that darned great horned owl which we have accommodated by letting it go after trapping it because we think it will be very useful in spite of the number of our birds it killed.

I'm still learning but I think that the desperation of the predator has to with environment.

 

[LynneP]

Because I live at the edge of the forest I never considered free-ranging, not at all. My opinion is that to keep birds we need to separate them from predators, and we have (hoping) to the best of our ability. We have a female raccoon named Mary who visits daily, and a colony of feral cats on site. Separation!

 

[DawnSuiter]

Quote:
We had coons last year, and 3 inside dogs who went out most all day long in our yard, those dogs, barking mad, peeing everywhere didn't discourage Rocky.

When we got the chickens, we ALSO got an outside dog for the poultry. Now he was a puppy and a stray so that works in our favor, and he's a pyranese mix and a big lovable guy. He sleeps on our porch in his dog crate in full view of the hen house 20 ft away during training & is free all day long and he patrols the whole place. Once trained, he will be allowed to roam all day & night.

He belongs to our pack, all day long the inside dogs are outside with him and he knows where he belongs, even though he sleeps outside. Its working well, and now I only need to protect my poultry from him, which is rather easy with normal precautions.

Recently we started having one of our inside dogs, who would rather live outside, sleep on our screened in back porch with the brooder chicks & soon turkey poults. This keeps the mice & anything else roaming at bay.

We live on the border of the Cherokee National Forest & The Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

We have tons of wildlife, including Turkeys & Deer.. NO ONE comes around here anymore, not even the neighbors dogs.

Outside big dog works, adopt a guardian dog.

 

[Silkiemama]

When predators are plentiful and destructive, the only answer is separation. Keeping your flock in a secured area when not being directly supervised, is the only way to ensure their protection. We built a coop from one of the designs offered thru the BYC site last year; the plans called for 1" square wire fencing sides, fastened with poultry tacks, and a wire floor (covered with wood chips). We were concerned with coons & weasels, (among others) reaching thru the wire to get at our young chicks - so we double fenced their coop with 1/2" wire around the outer perimeter. The top is also covered.

Good Luck - hope you are able to solve this dilemma! Raccoons can be difficult to discourage.

Just a thought - Do you remove the chicken food at night? We have found this helpful - the raccoons here have torn open secured metal containers to get at chicken feed before!

 

[EweSheep]

I used the three S for coons and possums when we lived on the farm out in Brimfield, IL. Cute as they may be but they are destructive as heck! My father killed two in broad daylights and one of them had babies which I found and called the park animal control and come for them. I loved those cute babies but felt sorry about killing the momma by mistake (Dad didnt know and he shot her before the sun went down, she was feeding her babies). So I fed them goat milk over the weekend and they were greedly little coons LOL!

So no more coon babies for me!

SSS is the way to go!

 

[cyanne]

We are about to tackle this problem ourselves, as we are in the process of moving from our house in the 'burbs out to 5 acres in the country.

Our plan so far is to build the coop and run as secure as possible (prevention), and we also plan to adopt a livestock guardian dog (great pyr / anatolian shepherd cross). We plan to give it free run of the property at all times and see if that keeps the predators to a minimum.

I agree that it's useless to trap for relocation or killing if the goal is to get rid of all potential predators...there will always be more waiting to take their place. However, I still plan to keep traps handy for those individuals who are too persistent and not dissuaded by my security measures. For those, I plan to help them cure their lead deficiency.

 

[midget_farms]

and that darned great horned owl which we have accommodated by letting it go after trapping it because we think it will be very useful in spite of the number of our birds it killed.

Lengel - how in the heck did you trap a great horned owl??

I get the picture everyone is weaving for me.

1. Don't feed coons (chickens or cat food)
2. Relocate, while humane doesn't eliminate the problem
3. 3 s's works, but requires constant (eternal) vigelance
4. Guard dog works - I really like this idea, but I have cute baby fawns that eat apples just outside our picture window that I don't want to get rid of.
5 - What I will most likely do - Cover the run. I have a 25ft by 25ft run with buried wire and an electric fence around the top. This doesn't seem to deter them all. I also have a huge role of chicken wire left over from a nursery run I built when the chicks (before the coon's took them) were young. I just need to design a support structure that will not have me ducking when i am in the run.


By the way - chicken feed is always in the coop with the chickens - I don't like feeding all the local birds with it.

 

[Rainman]

Quote:
As I take a LONGGGGGGGGG deep breath to prepare for the beating I am about to take. There is no shortage of humans in the world either. I believe in either trying to relocate or finding a way to live in harmony with the wildlife around you. There will NEVER be a time you eliminate all predators from your area. They will always come back. Rather than kill every living thing in sight, I beleive in a secure chickie haven and peaceful co-existence.

I won't give you a beating, I will say I strongly disagree with you. In most places you must kill any predator caught. Please don't believe all you see on T V. When the state sends a trapper out, the animal is not relocated. If they can't find a land owner with a back hoe for the large predators, they are taken out into the national forest never to be seen again. Many people feel we should relocate a critter until someone relocates one in their backyard and it kills some of their pets or a a child.
Do you think the woman that was mauled last week in southern Ca. wants that bear relocated?
Now for the humans, I believe we could do without a large number of them too.

I agree. A close friend of mine is a Federal biologist. His full time job is killing wildlife. It is a simple fact that we cannot live among the large predators that naturally control animals like raccoons. That's because raccoons are hard to catch but your children are not. If raccoons are allowed to breed out of control, they wipe out other animals like song birds and frogs. This reality is harsh because nature in not harmonious. It is cruel and brutal.

I frequently hear people self righteously bragging how they helped to ban hunting and trapping and I bite my tongue knowing that my friend is out everyday exterminating and discarding animals that use to be put to good use by hunters and trappers.

 

[ninjapoodles]

Rainman--Wow, it's not often that someone posts something that makes me consider something from a whole new perspective. It's actually never occurred to me that for medium-size predators like raccoons, 'possum, and fox, there really is no natural predator around where we live!

We missed ONE post when installing our hotwire on our new turkey pen, and the very first night we turned the turkeys out in it, raccoons climbed that one post and tore through the wire on top. We didn't lose any birds, but two of our turkey poults have sore, scraped legs.

You'd better believe that the traps are set and the gamecams back in place tonight.

 

[DawnSuiter]

I just wanted to add, that if this were really the wild, and it sort of is... and another animal, I don't care WHAT animal, came to MY territory, my place where I live & call home, and tried to steal my food supplies... I think I'd be killing said animal, and probably adding it to my food supplies, or at least disposing of it.

Just because I get a paycheck and live in a somewhat civilized human world, does not make me less of an animal. Protecting my food, my family & myself is a normal instinct and behavior. It should be applauded. This is part of the natural process, kill or be killed. There is something primal and important to remembering that YOU are an animal, and part of the food chain as well.

Silly humans, think we're superior.. we're not even at the TOP of the food chain!