We moved to our home five years ago and I immediately set out to build a chicken coop to house the chickens we brought from our previous home. When finished it was pretty cool (I thought so). It included a run on 3 sides of it with exits to access entire tracks of our yard. One exit was an underground tunnel that the chickens had to go through to access our raspberry and garden patch. Another exit accessed two sections of grass beneath our apple and peach trees. The 3rd exit accessed a hillside between our property and a public road.
Each of the larger tracks were fenced using 6' tall chicken wire with 2" diameter holes. I even created a youtube video called, "How to Build a Chicken Run" at the time of construction which now has over 80,000 views. It has now been 5 years and something interesting has happened. During the first 4 years I never had any chickens die from predators. I may have had the occasional neighborhood dog catch and kill a chicken that flew over my fences, but for the most part, my flock was safe within the fences and coop.
A few months ago we started loosing 1, 2, 3 and sometimes even more chickens a day. I couldn't figure out what was killing my chickens. It wasn't long before I had lost 30 to 40 birds. It was creepy too. These chickens were being ripped to pieces. Guts were everywhere. Entire bodies would be hardly touched, but would be disemboweled or have their heads missing. One night my wife thought she heard a chicken freaking out so I ran out there with my .22 rifle. I looked for signs of an attack and was kind of creeped out when I noticed a freshly killed chicken floating in a watering basin.
At this point I wondered if the attacker was maybe something more sinister. My mind went straight to sci-fi horror films like Alien and Predator. Yikes! Then I noticed wet foot prints leading away from the crime scene. I climbed inside the run and started investigating. The footprints weren't alien, they were familiar. I followed them through one of the exit points and out into the hillside track. They went up the hill and under the fence near the street curb. I followed the wet tracks across the pavement and into thick 1970's style shrubbery. That's where the trail ended.
My guess was either a dog or a raccoon. The tracks had dried a little and so they looked more like dog tracks to me. I went back to where the attacker had gone under the fence and found a tuft of hair. It looked like coon at first, but then I started wondering if it was hair from my neighbors husky. My neighbors dog had killed several of my chickens in the past so I accused him of the deed the next day to an apologetic neighbor. Just in case it wasn't the neighbors dog, that night I set a live catch trap. The next morning I had a large raccoon in my trap. I apologized to my neighbor and thought my troubles were over.
Yesterday I noticed that some of my chickens were missing so I set the trap out again expecting to catch another coon that had moved into the area. I hadn't improved my fences or coop and so my chickens were still vulnerable to attack. This morning I was surprised to find a skunk in the trap. So after years of allowing my fences and coop to fall into ruin, it has allowed predators to take advantage of these weaknesses in the borders and many chickens have been lost. I've been lazy. I have known about these vulnerabilities and I have done very little to strengthen them. My flock used to be very productive. We were getting so many eggs that we had to sell the excess.
The egg production of my flock was so great that the sales from their eggs actually paid for all of the feed they consumed and allowed us to enjoy eating eggs for free. During these good years I neglected to spend time and resources on protecting the producers. Now we barely get enough eggs to eat for ourselves, let alone sell. My chickens live scared and fly into the trees in my yard at night to avoid being eaten. They don't even sleep in the dilapidated coop anymore because they sense the danger.
I hope after reading this story you can draw some parallels to compare America's borders to the borders of my chicken flock. Compare America's once robust economy to my once robust egg production. Maybe think about who the dog, raccoon and skunk might represent. Who was I in this story? Was I not the government? Did I fail to protect my flock by not fixing my fences? Is our government failing to protect America's flock? I considered what I should do with the raccoon and the skunk who had come in and murdered bird after bird after bird. What should we do with those who come into our country and commit crimes? Food for thought...
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