Nice. An associate of mine is planning on starting some chickens this year. Forwarding now. Good find.
Some are heavy enough to require a tractor or vehicle to pull them around...at least one (the one mounted on bicycle wheels) is probably pull-able by human power....or a flock of harnessed chickens.
We have coyotes, raccoons, skunks, owls, and rarely a mountain lion/cougar. I plan to reinforce the chicken coop this year.
No the coop is not heated, and we had an owl kill one of our hens, but that was when we let the chickens 'free range'. Not anymore, but the coop is pretty big for 7 chickens. Has two parts, the roost for them to sleep at night, and the yard for them to play in. Once not too long after we moved here, I heard the chickens making a fuss, and a skunk was heading towards the chicken coop. I scared them off without having issues. And then last year our dogs alerted to me a coyote going near the coop from the vacant lot behind us. We never had problems with our chickens getting attacked(except for the owl incident), but we did have some critter, we presume a raccoon, kill 2 of our geese 2 winters in a row. It got in the fenced dog run area the 2nd time so it must have dug under. The fencing was the horse fencing stuff. That was the 2nd time though, the first time our male goose was in a corner and it just reached in and bit his head off(so I put chicken wire all around so nothing could reach in again, but then the critter just dug under. 2nd male goose was killed because they had a limp and couldn't get away fast enough. We no longer keep geese, not safe for them or us.
As far as protecting animals Live stock guardian dogs are the best way to do that! especially if you have two or three of them they will work as a pack and then problems like raccons and coyotes become solutions as far as dog food goes!
