When A Cow Raids the Chicken Coop

In my previous post, I talked about the cows eating more than grass. We discovered early on that Dolly also loves to eat chicken feed. Let me tell you a story.

We moved Dolly onto the farm in March, the breeder that we bought her from said that we needed to come get her before she was too far along into her pregnancy to move safely. We of course were hoping that we would be moved on the farm by then, and as you know we still are not living there. Anyhow, we weren’t really ready. We bought some mobile electric fence. and some deep totes for water, and some hay because at the time the pasture was more weeds and briars than anything else. That was as prepared as we could hope to be.

She was really upset the first few days, she didn’t drink much, and didn’t eat for at least a day. She eventually grew comfortable and we haven’t had any more issues like that since. The pigs had been on the farm for about a month about this point. We were a little more prepared for them. We used hog panels to make them a paddock until our electric pig fence came in the mail. When the fence came in, we decided to move the chickens from the backyard of our rental to the farm to live with the pigs. We figured that the pigs and the pig fence would help keep the predators away. I still believe this was a sound theory, except the pigs were really rough on our chicken tractor. They ate the chicken food and they pushed out and broke the chicken wire off of the coop because they couldn’t find the door? I guess…

At this point we decided to move the chickens out of the pig paddock and into the cow paddock. We figured the chickens didn’t mind either way, and the pigs would be fine especially since the chickens are jerks and regularly pecked them. Dolly didn’t seem to mind the chickens in her space, so we figured we had found a good balance.

Until one day, when we show up to the farm to take care of the animals and the chicken coop was pushed way over, against the fence, on the other side of the paddock, definitely not where we left it . The chicken feeder was smashed into several pieces. We were like what the heck. We realized when we started to move the coop back to the middle of the paddock that there was cow poop smeared everywhere on the INSIDE of the “run”. Man oh man do I wish we had a trail cam. Dolly somehow squeezed inside the chicken coop to eat the chicken food. I assume the getting in and eating went smoothly for her, but when she was finished panicked when her big cow body couldn’t turn around in that tiny coop. Can you imagine a cow squeezing inside of that coop? I can and it’s hilarious. I bet she was traumatized though. I suppose when you have that really good smelling food available inside your paddock…. you must find a way to eat it even if it is a bit difficult. I hope she felt proud of herself.

Needless to say, we moved the chickens outside of the cow paddock. They have been on their own ever since.