Home Grown Poultry Magazine | Chickens - Waterfowl

Especially if running with other dogs, the hunting pack mentality-which for millennia meant survival-takes over, and they can become cunning and efficient killers.

The first summer we abandoned the static chicken run, we had 50 Cornish Cross broilers in a Joel Salatin style 10×12 mobile pen on pasture. The birds were growing well, obviously benefiting from the pasture, and I was pleased by the new direction we were taking-until I went out one morning to find mangled white carcasses scattered over the pasture. Two of my neighbors’ dogs were still on the scene, clearly pleased with their exploits. (They had both dug under the bottom rail of the pen, and torn a hole in the poultry netting itself, to get at the hapless birds inside.) When I called them, they came without hesitation, wagging their tails. I then called the animal control officer, who hauled them away to the pound. Later, at my request, their owners came over to review the remains of the attack. Fortunately, they paid what I asked for the slaughtered birds and the repair of the pen.Unfortunately, not all owners are so cooperative when solicited by flock owners being harassed by their dogs. A buddy of mine has gotten fed up with going to owners of dogs on the loose who say, in response to his report of harassment of his flock, “Oh, really? Wow, you’ve really got a problem there, don’t you!” My buddy says that these days such owners only get one courtesy call. After that, it’s “shoot, shovel, and shut up.”

My solution to the attack on my mobile pen was to “wire for defense”: I mounted a small battery-powered fence charger right on the pen, and ran single-strand electric wire around the pen, both at nose level near the ground and about 12 inches up, standing it off from the pen with insulators. I never again had an attack on a movable pasture pen with a functioning electric defense.

I have, however, experienced two successful dog attacks on chickens inside fencing. One was from a wily old bitch and her year-old daughter (kept by a neighbor but not especially well fed, I suspect-these dogs were hunting not as fun and games, but out of hunger). Again, that pack mentality came to the fore: One dog would rush the fence, spooking the chickens inside into panic flight over the fence-right into the waiting jaws of the other dog. Another case where the animal control officer came riding to the rescue, and hauled the marauders off to jail.

I once lost a young Goose inside electronet to two dogs who obviously were wise to the sting in the net, but who used the same cunning to rush the geese in a narrow portion of the fence, forcing one to panic over the net and meet its doom. Since then, I avoid net fences with corridor-like portions, but configure them with plenty of interior space into which the birds retreat when threatened from the outside from any angle. If you are installing fixed runs with conventional poultry netting, I recommend wide and roomy over long and narrow.

I have heard reports of large dogs (or coyotes) jumping over electronet, which is usually 42 inches or so high. Certainly large canines can jump that high; but in my experience, they tend to lead with the nose. Once that sensitive probe gets a jolt from the fence, they do not back off and think, “Hmmmm, if at first you don’t succeed-” but rather, high-tail it into the next county.

A bit of research into your local and state laws regarding livestock and unrestrained dogs could be useful, especially if you have to confront the owner of a dog that is harrassing your flock. Most areas favor the livestock owner in such cases. Laws of both my county and state, for example, require dog owners to keep their dogs under control, and even give livestock owners the right to kill dogs “running at large” and harrassing their animals.

The masked bandit
One season when I was negligent and didn’t have a battery in the charger on my movable broiler pen, I had a sharp reminder from Mr. Raccoon of the importance of keeping my defenses up. The raccoon visited the pen during the night and tore a hole in the wire poultry netting (I bet you can’t do that!), then simply reached in and helped himself. There were eleven young broilers on the menu that night. Needless to say, I didn’t waste any time getting a new battery in service, and there was no more midnight drama out on the pasture.

The only other time I had losses to a raccoon was, again, my own fault. I had used electronet fencing to “park” a flock of layer hens on a plot of grass I intended to convert to blueberry bed-the chickens were busily “tilling in” the established sod for me. The site was on a slight incline, and as the chickens scratched up the existing grass, the debris gradually sifted downslope and accumulated over the lower charged horizontals of the fence. Every day as I serviced that pen I would say to myself: “Hey, boy, better pull that stuff off the fence!” But you know how it is on the homestead-always on the run-and I failed to take the needed action. Then one morning alarm bells went off in my head even before I consciously registered the splashes of feathers out over the pasture. I grabbed the electronet-not a whisper of charge. “Well, duh, boy,” I castigated myself, “got it now?” The masked bandit charged me only four laying hens for his kind and most valuable lesson: When using electronet, keep the fence lines clean.