OH YES! Raccoons are a BIG problem for some folks with poultry. They will kill birds, steal eggs, eat feed.........and once they locate an easy target, they are hard to get rid of. They can be quite destructive (structures) and very devastating if they get at a flock.
Personally, I've not had a problem, but a good friend has been plagued with coon problems for three years. He lost 20 4-month old pullets last summer - all in one night. I have a fairly active German Shepherd that is out most days and nights in summer, so that keeps critters at bay. My friend's dog is very old and decrepit so not much of a deterrent anymore.

Raccoons can get into almost anything if they want to, so IMO a dog (or donkey, goat, etc.) is the best way to deter them. Trapping is another option if they start bothering your birds.

geez,I also have a decrepit dog..(11 year old dalmatian with 3 legs..) I'll do my best to stop them from doing any damage,,,I would die if they killed my hens..thanks for the info...

Last summer we had to trap several raccoons that were getting into the hoop houses during the day when the chickens were free-ranging. Fortunately, they didn't get any chickens and we realized they were really after the dry cat food that we had for the feral kitten litter at the time.

We trapped them one by one with a Have-a-Heart trap and they were very easy to trap. (We moved the cat food to another location and put some in the trap ---- caught one raccoon each night!) Haven't seen any since.

As long as your hens are locked up at night in a raccoon-proof shelter, you're fine. Chicken-wire & netting are fine for day-time protection from hawks & things like dogs, but I have to have my hens locked in a hen house at night (with hardware cloth -- which raccoons cannot reach through -- over all the windows). I can tell you what raccoons can & will do to hens, but it's gruesome... And if you need more details on raccoon-proofing your hen house or pen, let me know & I'll send you the details of what I've done.

Raccoons are the terminators of the varmint world. They will never stop unless you stop them. There are only three ways: shoot them, live trap and move them at least 20 miles away, or build a varmint proof pen. They will kill for fun, eat virtually nothing, and will go through many hens in one night.

Just like they do in a corn patch...they pull the whole plant down, nibble on each ear and move on...in a melon patch they chew a snout sized hole in each ripe melon, so by the time you get to it it's full of bugs and already going sour.

I really don't mind sharing with the neighbors, but geez!

If you live trap them around here SPCA asks you drop them off at their facility, they put them down with no charge. They supposedly have a large number running around with rabbies and they are trying to get it under control

I have had racoons just kill the hens and eat their heads only and leave the bodies for a later visit. Its nasty. And so sad.

Every now and then a racoon gets in the hen house and eats the food. We always know that because they completely foul the water. (They clean the mud off their paws in the waterer and you never see that ordinarily.) So then we just set our Hav-a-Heart trap with cat food in it. We always get the coon that night. We then take the trap with the racoon in it into a field and shoot it with a shotgun.

So far, a racoon hasn't gotten our hens, but that is only because there is food in the hen-house. Once we know it has come to visit, he/she is gone. KABOOM.

There's an old coon living at the edge of my property. I've seen it in the daytme numerous times this past week, and I set a trap but haven't caught it yet. I think it's either elderly or sick -- moves very slowly, in fact one time it was sleeping in the broad daylight and I walked up to it, hollering and clapping my hands, but it didn't move until I poked it with a stick.

I've tried apples and peanut butter in the trap, stinky wet cat food (maybe it's the kind that will give it kidney failure!)... so far nothing works. Think I'll put some dry cat food in there, too, if that works for others.

Aargh.

Johanna

A raccoon got into my chicken pen once and wandered into the garage where the coop was for the winter. All of the chickens ran out into the pen to escape, except for one of my Buff-Laced Polish hens. She had a huge, bushy top hat, so she couldn't see too well and didn't know where to go or what to do. My husband had a hard time getting the raccoon out of the garage. It finally ran up a tree, but my poor hen was so frightened that she died later. I was so upset because it was only a few days later that their new coop arrived. If that raccoon hadn't shown up that day, I'd probably still have that hen.

Since then, the raccoon has shown up one more time in the garage, even though the chickens don't live there anymore. We had just gotten back from grocery shopping and my husband got out of the car to shoo it away. My son and I waited in the car and watched while my husband yelled and waved at the raccoon. He picked up a rake or something and the raccoon charged him with its teeth bared. It finally backed down after a few minutes and went back to the barn. It was weird behavior, but I don't think it was rabid, just probably wondering who writes the rules around here... I had been in the barn earlier that day and it was probably wondering why it is that I can go invade its space but then it gets yelled at for invading ours.

Johanna, if you haven't gotten the lethargic coon, be very cautious. It might be diseased and could give you or other animals (pets) an illness which might be fatal. If I was you, I would either dispatch it with a round from my 357 or call animal control, if you are in a city or suburb that restricts the disharge of firearms. Raccoons are normally nocturnal, so the daytime activity is somewhat out of the norm.

As a farm boy and a former Park Ranger I can tell you that Mr. Raccoon is one of the best adapted wild animals at living off of man's largesse! Raccoons can get into buildings, storage bins, and cages that you would have thought were animal proof. Once they find a means of gaining access they will use it again and again. The best methods of preventing them from entering is either materials stronger than they are or having weight which is too heavy for them to lift up. Sometimes they will dig under, but that is usually more of a canine trick. Besides the raccoons you also need to be concerned with skunks, wild cats (including feral house cats), foxes, coyotes, dogs, hawks and owls. One killer of domestic fowl, which is often overlooked, is wild birds. (Primarily they are vectors for disease which kill your domestic fowl. Try to prevent them from feeding and watering with your flock, and prevent them from roosting where your flock is kept.)

Your best defense is a good coop, nightly closing your chickens in, and a dog that is very diligent in watching the property at night. If you can get your dog to relieve themselves near the chicken run. The smell and presence of dog droppings and urine can discourage wild animals from coming into or frequenting that area.

We have resorted to using leg traps, electric fences and playing radios. All to little effect. It seemed like they learned to slip under the fence, trip the trap and then danced to the radio while enjoying the corn in our patch! I hope you don't have this sort of problem with your chickens.

We are having a horrible time, once again this year, with raccoons killing our chickens. I am EXTREMELY frustrated. I would rather not kill them because they do not understand the difference between animals that we choose to keep and those that are in the wild. We have altered our coop so much, so many different times. We have two locks on each door and boarded up every wide gap on our coop. Unfortunately raccoons are able to squeeze through the tiniest of spaces. Last year we had a mother with four babies getting in our coop. She was a beast! She would splinter the wood on the door where she was squeezing herself in and sounded very much like a bear. We thought we had fixed our coop, there is no gap bigger than three inches anywhere on that coop and still a raccoon gets in. We have caught him in there twice this week when we went out to see what the chickens were fussing about. The dog is outside tonight, his cage RIGHT next to the coop, touching it! And still I heard at least two hens go down. Sadly, I think we are out of luck with chickens, nothing seems to work, especially when the raccoons are breaking the boards off the dang doors, and its cruel to keep getting more chickens just to be eaten. I hope everyone else is able to solve their raccoon problems and keep their chickies safe. Good luck to you all.

We have lost 13 chickens in four days because of raccoons. I caught one the other night around midnight eating the head off one of my chickens and my husband shot it. I caught one again tonight in a cage and it is staying there till my husband can deal with it in the morning. They ripped boards off my coop and tore chicken wire off. It opened the container I keep their food in and ate it too. I feel bad for the poor chickens, they are probably so stressed out. I going to put a trap out every night to be safe.

I'm so sorry that folks are losing chickens to raccoons... I don't find that trapping & killing does much good unless you're willing to do it 24/7, forever. As soon as you've killed 1, others will move in. A guard dog helps some, but isn't foolproof. I live on the edge of hundreds of acres of unoccupied woods & have compost piles & gardens that tempt all sorts of wildlife into my yard. Probably my solutions won't suit most because they're fairly expensive, but here goes: My hen house is built like my house -- 2x4 framing w/ exterior-grade plywood. Zero cracks or gaps. Window openings are covered with hardware cloth, attached with screws (coons can pop out "staples"). Double layers of chicken wire cover the pen (also framed by pressure-treated 2x4s). The hen house is inside the pen & chicken wire goes over the top, with hardware cloth all around the bottom edge. The base of the pen sits on pavers (rather than burying the wire which rots in the ground after a few years). In the past decade I've had coons get through once & kill 1 hen (I hadn't noticed that the chicken wire had rusted out in one spot). The one thing I haven't tried is electric fencing -- that's supposed to work wonderfully and be fairly inexpensive, and you can run it off a solar cell & battery.

I build our coops like the above poster. I have had racoon chew through the plywood roof and eat the chickens inside the coop. I started putting roll roofing on the roof over the plywood. They must not like the taste of the roll roofing. We have chain link kennels around the coops w wire tops.

my family always kept a few Chinese geese with the chicken flock. they are very vocal , large ,aggressive birds! very protective of THIER flock! I've seen them chase off 120lb. german shepards before! just their loud honk scares the heck out of animals! make great watchdogs! they are good egg layers too! you have to spend some time with them when they are young otherwise they see YOU as a threat! ;) if they're raised with chickens they accept them as their siblings.

Raccoons are a terrible animal. They will kill chickens any time of the day, eat the feed too. I finally set up a camera to see what was getting all of my birds, we caught and hauled off so many, even after the chickens were all killed. They were climbing up about 8 feet of hardware cloth and going in and down a little crack that was not covered just below the roof line of the screen house my chickens had. My chickens were in the chicken house at night and when the automatic door opened in the morning, the raccoons were waiting for them in the daylight. 19 birds at one time that time. Earlier in the season my chickens were outside, came home in the afternoon and we had lost at least six. I no longer have chickens.

Sue

We just lost 4 chickens yesterday. Whatever killed them didn't eat them just covered them up with straw from the coop in 4 different locations. They weren't bloody and I didn't get a chance to see if they're heads were missing as the wife gathered them up for burial. What could it have been? They didn't come back last night to retrieve their kill.