Dhkoenig
Songster
Hi All - well we just had our first bear!!! I decided to clean out my fridge and cabinets (no good deed goes unpunished....) and had a bunch of garbage bags next to my husband's truck in the driveway waiting to be put in there for him to take to his dumpster at work. Meanwhile I had stuck my ladies in a metal run that we have in the yard next to our sturdy full-time run. I usher them from one to the other and then close the door so they can have some time out of the run until free range time later. Well I was doing emails etc and thought "Oh I should look in on the girls" and I noticed that they were all standing at attention. I looked up to see if there was a hawk but didn't hear/see anything. So I walked down toward where they were and thought "whoa maybe there is a fox or something" so I looked to my left and there was a very large bear eating our garbage like 50 feet away. I ducked down and managed to get the chickens from the absolutely worthless metal run into their regular run. Shaking like a leaf I got myself out of harms way and then a neighbor thought it would be a good idea to scare it with a big 4x4 atv thing and it ran away from our garbage and went straight toward our run. then once it felt safe it went around to the backside of their coop! I had a chicken wire screen door closed so that they still had a breeze and the bear was literally sniffing around. My husband went out with pots and pans and scared it over the fence out of our yard but now it knows my chickens are there. I have two dogs so i am worried about getting an electric fence that can hurt my dogs. Tonight i was glad I had my dogs because they barked their heads off all night but I know they won't bark in the middle of the night. Can I protect my chicken's coop/run with electric fencing without potentially shocking my dogs? Anybody have a suggestion of one that can effectively stave off a bear trying to barge his way into our coop/run that won't harm my dogs? thanks!