Keeping Your Animals Safe At Night
Keeping animals, both domestic and otherwise, is a hard lifestyle to pursue. There’s a lot you have to know, there’s a lot to look out for, and there’s a lot of land preparation you have to do to make sure any creatures you keep in the back garden are as happy and healthy as possible. But the main risk area is the night time, and everything that can happen whilst the sun is down.
If you’re someone with plans for your smallholding, or just a large garden that you want to put a coop or two in it, then here’s some of the most important information you need. Of course, keeping your animals safe at night is of top priority, and it’s easier to deter any predators that might be skulking about than you think.
Cows are big and heavy, and you wouldn’t want one to chase you, but they’re still considered prey animals!
Close Everything Up
If you have rabbits, chickens, or a duck or two, make sure they’re ushered into their coops or hutches every night and closed in until the morning. This is a very simple step that stops foxes and the like from being able to sneak in, especially if there’s a hole in the fence you haven’t spotted.
Don’t worry, with a rabbit hutch that’s big enough, none of your fluffy critters is going to feel sore from losing the green fields outside. Just make sure you remember to go out every night and close up all the doors!
Cut Down Your Bushes
If you’ve got big hedges at the back of your house or surrounding your field, make sure they’re as short as can possibly be, or try and remove them completely. This helps to make the entire area unsuitable for any kind of predator, seeing as there’s less of an ability to sneak up on what they’re hunting.
And if you’ve got chickens just milling around the farm, settling in the grass with no awareness of their surroundings, you’re going to need the area as open as it possibly can be!
Do Regular Maintenance on Animal Houses
You want to make sure that there’s no loose boards or holes in the sides or backs of your coop or hutch, and checking every day or every other day is the best way to keep this risk to a minimum. Any kind of animal could sneak in via one of these, no matter how small you yourself might consider the hole!
Have some spare boards and nails on hand at all times to patch up a hole or breakage like this, as they crop up all the time from a variety of reasons. And if there’s been particularly bad weather the day before, you’re going to want to get out there to check!
Keeping your animals safe during the night time is best done via regular maintenance and common sense, so make sure you’re using methods like these to stay on top of predators.
This is a collaborative post.
