judith - sorry to hear about your birds. Do have raccoons around your area? It sounds to me more like a coon. They are pretty adept at opening things and yes, they will decimate a flock rather quickly.

Can you get someone to come live-trap the perpetrator? Maybe animal control or something?

I would second the live trap idea. My humble guess is that it is a critter like a coon. Something much smaller than a cougar.

I assume that you informed the parents of those two little kids that there is SOMETHING carnivorous hanging around. Of course you did.

In your shoes, I think I would stake out the area and see what shows up. It can't be comfortable not knowing. Who suggested it might be a cougar? Have you looked for tracks?

I just had a safe idea how you may be able to find out. Get a bag of flour and sprinkle it in a thin layer where the critter pushed under the fence and around the chicken house door where it broke in. If it comes back, there should be tracks in the flour to help you with the ID.

I know that the animal control around here will lend out live-traps for people to try to catch nuisance animals, whether stray dogs or 'coons or 'possums. Can you get one locally and try trapping? I have to say that it sounds more like a 'coon than a cougar to me, because I don't think a cougar would be able to open the catch, while I can imagine a 'coon fiddling with it until it opened. The flour sounds like a good way to find out what it is - and beefing up your latches and enclosures might let you continue to keep hens. Good luck.

Coons can cause a lot of havoc. I think I have one in the barn again, had a problem last year, didn't get any baby ducks until July, cause coon ate the eggs and then the few hatchlings we got.

A couple of years back, I went into the tack room to feed, and was startled when something growled at me. It was a coon that had eaten all my horse treats. My hand had been about 8 inches from it. Scared me silly! He was about the size of a basketball from all the treats he'd eaten. But when animal control came in they just had a little bitty cage. Pretty funny, looking back.

Still there is a lot of rabies in raccoons in the East.

I hope the flour trick allows you to identify the bandit!\

Kitty

My experience with coons has been that they eat the crop and leave the rest of the duck. (I don't have chickens.)

I saw a cougar walking down our lane the other day, and our animals are getting hurt. We are starting to get a bumper crop of cougars this year. I'm in Vernonia, 30 miles east of Portland.

Thanks to all of you who wrote that it may have been racoons that got my chickens. The tracks in the lean-too dirt looked like cougars. Two days after I posted here, it came out in our local paper that a Cougar had killed a young pony that had been in a three strand electric fence right close to the owners house. The cougar came back for the carcase and was shot. It was approx 7 klm from my place and the article said it had roamed as far as the road across the 2-lane highway from us. Now, two weeks later a second cougar was killed not far from my place. The gal across the highway and up the hill saw the cougar and has lost her cat. Approx 1/2 klm north of us, a cougar got a sheep. I have my lone 15 year old duck padlocked in the dog house at night and well fenced in during the day. Yes, I notified the mother of the children who were playing by my chicken run, she was the first person to suggest it was a cougar. Out of 5 hens and a rooster, we have not found one piece of body, only a few feathers.

Is it against the law to kill a cougar that is killing your livestock where yall live? My first thought when reading this was to get a shotgun with some buckshot or a rifle and tie a chicken up out in the open by the coup and wait for what ever it is to show up. Especially if there are small children in the area playing around its feeding ground.