What my chickens need is a dog

Of the nine chickens I used to keep here in Northamptonshire only one survived the summer, and it was the least appealing of them — broody, squawky, aggressive, and a bad layer. The others were all taken, one by one, by foxes. Unfond though I am of the only survivor, a black Sussex hen, she has at least enabled me to cling on to my position as a keeper of poultry, however little of it, and I have now bought a white Sussex hen to keep her company. But I am keeping them cooped up all the time — something I promised I would never do — until I can find some way of protecting free-range chickens from their vulpine predators.

As I have written before, I have received a lot of advice from readers about how best to do this. It has included having radios blaring away all the time in the garden and recruiting a gang of young boys to pee round its perimeter because ‘foxes will not cross human urine’.