Would the urine of an eight-year-old protect my chickens?

I was predicting in a recent column that the arrival of spring would be bad news for my poultry, and so it has turned out: two ducks, a fat, waddling Silver Appleyard called Doris and a graceful, elegant little call duck called Marina (the loyal partner of a still-surviving drake called Boris), have disappeared, almost certainly victims of a marauding fox in search of food for its new cubs. For a while I thought that the missing ducks might be sitting on eggs somewhere, but the belated discovery of a pile of feathers put an end to this hope. Now I am waiting gloomily for the fox to strike again, probably this time against my chickens, which can’t even hope to escape to the safety of the garden pond.

What, then, can I do to protect them? Keeping them in their coops all the time would work, I suppose, but I wouldn’t dream of it. I would rather they risked death than be stopped from wandering freely around the garden during daylight hours. An electric fence around the garden might also do the trick, but it’s an unappealing and expensive idea. So should I take the advice of a reader, Judith Cawthorne of Bury St Edmunds, who has just written to me promising ‘the easiest of help’? ‘Foxes will not cross human urine,’ she says. ‘All that is needed is a supply of orange juice and local eight-year-old boys, who will be thrilled to “water” the perimeter of your hen run on a regular basis.’

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Mark Galeotti

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Thank you, Mrs Cawthorne; but I wouldn’t exactly call that solution ‘easy’. I live over a mile from a village, so where would I find all these eight-year-old boys? And how many of them would I have to kidnap, and how much orange juice would I need to feed them, if they were to keep the circumference of a nine-acre garden permanently moist? I suspect that the task would be as hopeless as the one facing the ‘seven maids with seven mops’ in Lewis Carroll’s poem.