I bought some chicks from the local Tractor Supply a while back (I choose what they eat + they taste so much better when you raise/butcher them yourself) and everything seemed to be going ok. We had a nice enclosed chicken coop so that the dogs, hawks etc couldn't get at 'em...or so we thought.
We came to the pen one day and found multiple chickens dead. No heads missing, no holes dug under the fencing, nothing to indicate how they were killed. We slowly kept losing chickens that way until the last few kicked the bucket. Any ideas on what might have killed them? I want to raise them for easy eggs and meat but it's not worth the money/hassle of raising chicks indoors if they die before I get them on the dinner table.
Some details:
We live in an area bounded on 2 sides by farmfields which provide easy access to any predator.
The coop was essentially a large cube of chicken wire/wood framing. We never found any hole that might provide entry except for the top of the cube, where the two sides of the chicken wire meet.
EDIT: also, the ground was churned up, but I couldn't recognize any marks because of all the chicken scratches in the ground :P.
We came to the pen one day and found multiple chickens dead. No heads missing, no holes dug under the fencing, nothing to indicate how they were killed. We slowly kept losing chickens that way until the last few kicked the bucket. Any ideas on what might have killed them? I want to raise them for easy eggs and meat but it's not worth the money/hassle of raising chicks indoors if they die before I get them on the dinner table.
Some details:
We live in an area bounded on 2 sides by farmfields which provide easy access to any predator.
The coop was essentially a large cube of chicken wire/wood framing. We never found any hole that might provide entry except for the top of the cube, where the two sides of the chicken wire meet.
EDIT: also, the ground was churned up, but I couldn't recognize any marks because of all the chicken scratches in the ground :P.
Last edited: