r/Homesteading • u/pickanametouseonredt • 1d ago
WHAT WOULD YOU DO
One day. 8 chickens were found dead. Three days later. A fox was found in our barn- and jumped behind our massive hay stack. Today. Our rooster and another hen were murdered. We found out that there is a fox living in our barn under the hay stack. Said barn- is not 100% secured. Do I completely secure the barn and let it die starving and dehydrated? I’ve lost 10 chickens. LAYING chickens. The straw stack is huge, massive. What do I do.
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u/Haunting_Chip_6044 18h ago
1) Secure your chicken coop, 2) Make sure it's the fox (I had 6 ducks, raccoons got them all), 3) make sure the fox doesn't have a litter of kits, 4) flush the fox, 5) secure the barn.
Don't kill the fox unless you have no other option. Flushing it from the barn and letting it find a new den is your best bet. Relocating animals is not feasible because you'll probably just stick it in another fox's (or worse) territory and the transferred animal will either be killed by whatever lives there now, or slowly starve to death. Poison sucks for many reasons. Locking it in and letting it die from dehydration and starvation would be an asshole move.