unknown perp attacking chicken feed container

[carwinew]

I can't find a post for this topic so here goes.
We live west of Ft Worth (Texas, that is) on the edge of a really small town with unimproved pasture on 3 sides of us.
We have our horse feed and chicken pellets in 4 matching plastic bins that each hold a 50# bag of feed. They sit on pallets in a group in a open sided hay barn.The chicken feed bin had a widening crack on the bottom that we taped up with duct tape to keep all the feed from running out.
Over the last couple of weeks when I've gone out to feed the animals in the AM and release the chickens to free range, I have found only the chicken feed bin moved a foot or two from the rest of the bins or flipped over if it was close to empty. This AM the bin was moved and the previously unopened feed sack adjacent to the bin was tore open on top, pushed down and the most of the printed part of the sack was ripped off leaving only the brown interior sack. I put what remained of the feed (about 40#) in the bin and realized the duct tape was totally gone off the bin bottom. Swapped out the chick feed bin with the hay cube bin which is uncracked and called it good.
Now my question is - what is coming for the chick feed? Some of the chickens are in a wire coop only a few feet away and are untouched as is their coop. One of the other bins has sweet grain in it and it isn't touched. I'm thinking possibly a raccoon or two but there are posts about raccoons as predators doing major damage to chickens rather than just trying to drag away their feed. I know if I had a choice between chicken feed or chicken I'd go for the chicken. Our dogs are inside at night but haven't alerted on anything outside nor have we heard from the horses who have their corral only about 30' away. Ideas?

 

[keljonma]

Sounds almost like a 2 legged predator to me. I don't know of any raccoon that can move a feed bin full of 40# of feed.

Can you leave your dogs in the barn overnight?
Can you light it up with floodlights?
Can you get one of those sheds that you can lock with a padlock to put the feed and hay in?

I would make a journal of everything going on and the dates each instance occured. Pictures for your records would be great too.... Like pic A is the pic of how we left the barn when we put the animals down for the night. And pic B is the pic of what it looked like in the morning.

Might be helpful if you have to go see the sherriff.

 

[miss_thenorth]

And if it were a raccoon, why would it not go for the horse feed that has molasses in it?? Maybe b/c the container was compromised, as in there was tape on it--the smell was escaping leading the predator to that specific feed.

Hmmmmm....

 

[averytds]

I don't know about the feed vs chicken, but I have had unopened chicken feed sacks opened by raccoons before. Didn't know it was coons until I stumbled upon them in the process. The dogs made not a peep. They were into it for about 3-4 days I think before I caught them.

 

[Nuggetsowner:)]

I had to put my feed into a galvanized metal garbage can because preditors ate the lid off my plastic one! No kidding!!

 

[SpottedCrow]

I had to bring mine inside because the squirrels were eating through my plastic buckets.

 

[nnbreeder]

Tonight spread some plain white flour around the area and look for tracks in the morning.

 

[LoneCowboy]

I had my dog food out in a plastic one, and the raccoons ate through the lid. So I bought a metal one and then the raccoons would wake me up in the middle of the night as the lid hit the cement porch. So I had to get a tie down and stap the lid on. They haven't got to the chicken feed yet. If I leave the lids sightly off the squirrels in though.

 

[miss_thenorth]

Quote:
Great idea!!

 

[AK-Bird-brain]

Last winter I kept finding the lid off of our feed bin. Thought it was dogs dumping into it until I caught a moose eating out of it.