Cunning foxes will hide in the bush, watch your birds keenly from a distance before making the big move to devour them because they are an easy source of food to catch. All too often they succeed in making a mess out of the chickens and sneak away unnoticed into the wild.
A brood of chickens in a poultry farm in Northwest France attacked and killed a hungry fox that tried creeping inside their shelter.
Light controlled automatic hatch doors that close down when the sun sets shut in the fox that is thought to have sneaked inside the chickens’ pen in a farming school at dusk.
The hens in the school farm wander about during the day, except when they are laying eggs, and return to the henhouse before the sun goes down.
The fox was found dead the following morning when the students at Le Gros Chêne school in Brittany went around inspecting the surroundings and the condition of the birds.
“There, in the corner, we found this dead fox. There was a herd instinct and they attacked him with their beaks,” said Pascal Daniel, the head of farming at the school.
When a fox gains access to a henhouse, it kills and carries away as many birds leaving little evidence of an attack, unlike in an open field, where it can get one kill.
“The last time a fox visited one of the school’s chicken coops, more than a year ago, it turned out much worse for the hens, ” Daniel recalled
There are a number of ways chicken farmers have adopted to protect their birds from the marauding foxes. there has been a range of methods employed in controlling them. Poisoning, trapping and baiting among others have worked for the farmers over time. It’s entirely up to the farmer to protect his chicken.
