If you've had chickens for a while, you loathe raccoons. If not, you will. Here's why:

A while ago we started losing 1-3 chickens a night. Some were completely eaten, others barely touched. This is one of the more infuriating aspects of predators: they don't have an "off" switch. Instead, they keep killing until they run out of targets.

In the wild, their prey scatters and the predators only get one or two victims. But a fox or a raccoon that squeezes into a closed henhouse will kill your entire flock.

That's one reason I use open housing — no doors, and one side open — so the chickens can scatter. (Open-front housing has other advantages, which you'll see when you read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses.)

How did the raccoon get in, in spite of my electric fence? Different ways, it appears. There was only one well-defined game trail, but when I adjusted the electric fence so that anything using it would surely get zapped, the losses continued. Raccoons have no fear. A dog or coyote that gets zapped by an electric fence will never come near it again, but raccoons will prowl it endlessly, looking for spots where it can squeeze under. They can squeeze pretty flat, and if you put the fence wire too low, it shorts out. Farming sounds so easy! But I'm sure  you agree that farming is no panacea.

When adjusting the fence didn't work, I set snares. Snares are pretty easy to use, and by placing them only on game trails heading towards your all-night chicken buffet,  you can see how they can be very selective,  nabbing only the miscreants. After a few nights of nothing, we caught a single raccoon. And the losses stopped.

All that carnage from one smallish animal? Don't tell me Nature is kind!

In the bad old days, there was a Federal bounty on just about anything that moved, including raccoons. And old-timer told me that the bounty and the price of pelts paid for his pack of coon hounds. One result was that chicken and sheep farmers had little to fear from predators.

When the bounty dried up in the Seventies, so did the hunting and trapping, and the raccoons, bobcats, and coyotes became an ever-increasing threat. Even since I started raising chickens in 1996, things have gotten much worse. Benton County keeps cutting the amount they're willing to chip in as matching funds for the Federal predator control program — which only targets animals that are actively killing livestock — with predictable results: If you don't learn all about electric fences and snares,  your chickens are goners. It's almost as bad in town as it is in the country!

Karen and Dan were moving a batch of pullets from the brooder house onto the pasture one evening, and saw three rats scurrying around. You know what that means: if you see three in the open, there must be thirty in hiding somewhere!

We usually don't have much trouble with rats on the pasture. Our chicken feed is in big galvanized range feeders outdoors, and we move the feeders each time we refill them. Any rats who take up residence in tunnels under the feeders have their tunnels exposed when the feeders are moved. Something — probably owls — takes care of the rest.

Only it's not working right now. Natural pest control is great when it works, but when it doesn't, now what? That's the problem with farming. You do the same thing over and over, but the results are different every time!

Well, whatever you believe about "live and let live," you have to draw the line at a rat population explosion. Their population can balloon really fast, and you can't have them overflowing from the pasture into the house! So it was time to take steps.

The simplest method of dealing with rats on a pasture occupied by hens (barring the use of a sniper rifle and a night-vision scope), is to use rat poison in tamper-proof bait stations. Now, I don't like using poison any more than you do, but this is a good example of Plamondon's Law: "The alternatives are even worse."

Bait stations are basically plastic boxes that creatures larger than a rat can't get into. On the better bait stations, the bait is secured one way or another to prevent the rats from carrying it off and possibly leaving it somewhere inappropriate. They have to eat it right there in the bait station, where any crumbs won't cause trouble.

(I also looked up the poison in question, and it's a lot more toxic to rats than it is to chickens, not that the chickens will get any exposure to it with the spiffy bait stations I use.)

I have some J. T. Eaton 903CL Rat Fortress bait stations, which I like very much. They have a clear lid so you can see if the bait needs to be replaced, which is a great feature. They're surprisingly hard to find. [Update: an Alert Reader found them at FarmTek.com — a good outfit that I've done business with many times.] Except for the clear lid, the Motomco rat bait station below seems to be equivalent.

I use the Tomcat brand bait blocks, which are weatherproof one-ounce cubes with a hole in the middle, so you can thread them onto a retaining wire that keeps the rats from walking off with them.

I put three bait stations on the pasture four nights ago, each next to a feeder. I didn't expect much activity, since the feeders were full, but I figured that when the feeders went empty, the rats would switch to the bait. The next morning, though, all the bait had been eaten! The rats preferred it to chicken feed and whole corn, apparently. The next night, almost all the bait had vanished again (one bait station was relatively unvisited). The next night, the same. Last night, some bait was left in all of the stations. [Update: The bait is no longer being eaten at all.]

I think this means that the rat population is starting to dwindle. In the past, I've used bait stations around the house, brooder houses, and barn, and the pattern was the same: initial interest in the bait, followed by lessened activity and a distinct absence of rodents that sometimes lasted as long as a year.

(By the way, if you are of the opinion that "rats are something that happen to other people," you will eventually be proven wrong. Sadly, they're likely to strike your brooder house first, and kill a lot of baby chicks. You don't want that! I recommend using bait stations or snap traps in your brooder house when it's not in use, or bait stations outside it all the time. Having your helpless baby chicks killed by rats is just too heartbreaking.)

You want to get the good bait stations. I just bought some cheap ones, and I regret it now. Too flimsy and insecure. I'm probably going to throw them away and buy some of the ones above.

By the way, there is now an organically certified rat poison. Is that weird, or what?

If you're wondering what kind of grass is best for grass-fed chickens, the answer is, "green grass."

What I mean is, lush green grass is loaded with vitamins and is has lots of available nutrients, but as it fades to brown, it becomes more and more useless to chickens. Chickens aren't ruminants and can't digest cellulose, so it's the soft, green, palatable grasses that count.

Lush spring pasture is the best, of course, and that's easy enough. The trick is providing green grass year-round, or close to it. Cool-season grasses will stay green all winter in mild climates, and warm-season grasses will stay green all summer when the cool-season grasses have all browned off.

Wheat and oats make great pasture for poultry until they die in the summer. Perennial fescues aren't my favorite grasses, but they hold up well year-round, and (as it turns out) poultry don't mind endophytes the way cattle do, so the biggest black mark against fescues simply isn't relevant with poultry.

I've even heard good things said about crabgrass as a poultry grass!

And let's not forget clovers. In a lot of climates, Ladino clover is considered the best, partly because it provides good nutrition (vitamins and protein, but few calories, just like grasses), and partly because its season is later than most grasses, giving lots of summer greenery when the grasses have faded.

So, remember, focus on stuff that stays green first, and worry about the details later, if at all. Most henyards will require a mix of species for long-season greenery.

And for the complete word on green feed for chickens, you'll want to read Feeding Poultry by G. F. Heuser. Heuser was a poultry science professor at Cornell University, and he wrote this poultry nutrition book right at the tipping point — just after poultry nutrition became fully understood (with the discovery of vitamin B12), but just before the move to factory farms. So the book has a small-flock, traditional mindset that matches the mindset of today's dedicated hobbyists and farmers like us, while still being modern and trustworthy. And it has a whole chapter on green feed! It's a big book, very detailed and thorough, and (unlike more recent books) was written with the intelligent layman in mind. This book can open up new horizons, while saving you from the many feeding blunders that people make.

While this story about eggs and weight loss isn't new, it was news to me! Basically, one group of overweight people were given egg breakfasts and another bagel and cream cheese breakfasts with equal numbers of calories, and the egg-eaters ate less during the rest of the day, felt less hungry, lost more weight, and had more energy!

"Where can I sign up?" you ask. Well, you could do a lot worse than to throw out your cereal and bagels and eat a more traditional breakfast. Grass-fed eggs, for preference. The concept seems to be that protein satisfies your hunger longer, while carbohydrates set you up for renewed cravings a short time after eating.

The Atkins Diet, Grass-Fed Goodness, and Me

High-protein breakfasts (and lunches and dinners) have worked for me, too. I've lost 45 pounds [Update, March 5 -- Make that fifty pounds!] on the Atkins Diet, which I started a couple of years ago, and it certainly reduced my appetite. I enjoyed food as much as ever, but I ate less of it. Grass-fed eggs, pastured pork, and grass-fed chicken that we raise right here on the farm have been a big factor in my success. My only regret is that no one has bred a pig 50 feet long so it has enough bacon! We always run out of bacon first, and you just can't buy bacon like we get from our own pigs.

Another thing that helps me is to weigh myself every day and put a dot on a weight-loss chart. This give me daily feedback about my progress. If I start backsliding, I see it and start managing my eating more strictly.

I recommend a digital scale for this — they're very affordable these days, and they're a lot more accurate than the old spring-type models. It's best to buy tools you can trust!

The Most Important Thing is Not to Quit

Probably the most important thing is to make a firm decision that you're never, ever going to give up. You're going to keep working on weight loss, one way or another. Your tactics may change, but the goal will remain constant. If you fall off your diet, that's okay — it doesn't mean a thing. We all mess up sometimes, and that means that the occasional failure is normal, expected, meaningless. But you're going to get right back on the diet again.

You can switch diets, too, if you get stuck or get tired of the current one. You can do anything you want, except giving up!

How I Used Self-Hypnosis to Get Unstuck

I'm still not at my goal, and I've stalled a couple of times. I got stuck after losing 20 pounds, but used a self-hypnosis recording to get me unstuck and lose another 25 pounds. I was impressed!

I don't know what you think about hypnosis, but you can't argue with success, can you? Oh, wait, of course you can -- but you won't, because you're too considerate. Science has caught up with hypnosis over the past couple of decades, and it's lot less mysterious than it used to be. This is reflected in the format of self-hypnosis programs that you can buy on the Web. They tend to start with a calm discussion of the problem and its solution (say, weight loss), then walk you through some progressive relaxation to hopefully get you in a receptive state of mind, then they restate the solution again in a somewhat different way, often using anecdotes or metaphors in addition to making obvious suggestions like, "You're going to get slimmer because that's how you want to be."

I'm fond of the products from Hypnosis Downloads.com, which has a huge selection of downloads. Also, they're use less gimmickry than anybody. No echo chambers, no new-age music -- they're more straightforward and workmanlike than anybody else I've run into. Not to mention that their prices are reasonable and they have steep volume discounts if you buy more than one program.

I'm also talking a long walk every day and doing my farm chores, but I've done all those things for ages and they've never caused me to lose weight. The Atkins Diet and the self-hypnosis are what have worked for me. Two years so far, and no backsliding, though I'm still not where I want to be.

But eating eggs for breakfast is a good start!

These two videos document the "Chicken of the Future" contest from 1948, showing what, for the time, were the best chickens and the best practices for raising them (some of which most of us would envy, even today!)

They're worth watching just for the glimpses they give of good chicken-raising technique, but be careful to take a good hard look at the butchered carcasses! They look just like rubber chickens. And the chickens of 60 years ago grew more slowly, had higher mortality, and were less productive than modern hybrids.

This contest was very well run. Earlier egg-laying contests were easy to game, and the results of the contests had nothing in common with what you'd get if you bought baby chicks from the contestants. They were basically an accidental scam.

For the Chicken of the Future test, they started with a large number of hatching eggs -- too many to cherry-pick the ones from the best hens -- which were all incubated together. The day-old chicks were brooded in identical pens, then moved into different identical pens after the brooding period. When the cockerels were 12 weeks old, they were all butchered at the same time (with winning pens giving a dressed carcass weighing probably a little more than two pounds!) subjected to USDA inspection and grading, and generally compared with one another.

Feed consumption and overall profitability were kept track of. Profitability was affected by chick mortality, carcass value of the cockerels, rate of lay and size of eggs of the pullets, mortality among the pullets, and feed consumption. Careful records were kept. In the Forties, dual-purpose breeds like New Hampshire Reds usually won in total profitability -- so much so that no one seems to have bothered entering any White Leghorns!

Another interesting point was that the contest flocks had outbreaks of disease, which was considered routine at the time. Up until the Twenties, when small farm flocks were the rule, sickness in poultry flocks was uncommon, but it got worse and worse as flock sizes increased, reaching its peak in the Forties and Fifties, in spite of the introduction of antibiotics. Gradually, better biosecurity methods were introduces and the amount of disease plummeted. An outbreak of disease in a contest flock would not be considered routine today.