How to keep wild animals out of a chicken coop

One of the Hardest Things About Chickens One of the hardest things about having chickens is keeping them safe from wild animal predators. It seems that all types of wild animals want to eat your chickens: weasels, stray dogs, raccoons, and even chicken hawks. However, we are smarter than those animals and we can protect them from attacking our chicken coops. Let’ find out together how we can protect our chickens, hens, and roosters from wild animals!

Use Hardware Cloth
Never use chicken wire to protect your chicken coop. Instead of placing chicken wire around window areas for ventilation and around the bottom of your chicken coop, install hardware cloth around such areas. Some wild animals are capable of ripping open chicken wire and enter the chicken coop at their own will. Hardware cloth (the finer the better) is much more expensive than chicken wire but it much more than a deterrent.

Protect Your Chicken Coop from Burrowing Animals
To protect your chicken coop from burrowing animals, you should bury hardware cloth at least 12 inches down all around the chicken coop to protect your chickens from rodents and other animals that make burrows.





Make a Solid Floor
A solid floor will keep burrowing wild animals such as rats or raccoons from getting in your chicken coop. A solid floor will make the wild animals take more time to chew through a solid floor. If you add hardware cloth together with a solid floor, that can be an effective approach.

Leave a Space for Your Cats
If you have pet cats, you should elevate your coop’s floor about a foot off the ground. Your pet cats will crawl under that area and thereby eliminate any rodent or other small wild animals that visit your chicken coop.

Surround the Bottom with Electric Wire
Another option for securing your chicken coop is securing its bottom with electric wire near the ground so that a wild animal such as a rat or raccoon will get its body shocked when it tries to burrow under.

Surround the Perimeter of Your Chicken Coop with Electric Net Fencing
This can be used in addition to basic preventive measures such as a hardware cloth and a coop floor. Tiny predators such as mice may be able to sneak under your chicken coop without getting shocked since the very bottom string sometimes doesn’t touch the ground.

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How to keep wild animals out of a chicken coop

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