Solitary chicken - need advice

[Jigsaw1711]

We are horrified to find this morning that a fox has removed the plastic poo tray from our cube and pulled one of my beloved hens (beautiful buff Orpington) through the gap by the bars and suffered a horrendous death. beware!!! Has this happened to anyone else, how can we stop this happening again? Help please.

 

Totally shocked that a fox managed to remove the tray as they are fairly heavy and plastic! I always thought they'd be totally safe.

 

RIP Butternut xxxx

[Ain't Nobody Here]

I'm so sorry to hear that, what a horrible shock for you . I don't have a cube so maybe the tray is different to my eglu, but is there a metal clip that is supposed to secure it in place?

[Bramble]

How awful Jigsaw - poor little Butternut

 

I must admit that I've wondered about how secure the poo trays on the cube are - they have metal clips underneath them that should clip into place and, hopefully, stop foxes pulling them out. However, both clips on my cube are pretty bent and unless I straighten them out by hand and check that they've clipped into place properly I'm pretty sure the tray would be fairly easy to move. Might be worth having a look at your clips under the poo trays.

[Jigsaw1711]

I thought they were secure but obvs not. Still can't believe that a fox would pull out the whole tray and do what he did. Just awful! I thought they would be safe in their house

[mollyripkim]

Oh no, what a horrible thing to happen, poor little girl.

I have often wondered about the clips too as I often have to bend them back into shape and if a determined predator dug and scratched at the trays then they would come out as you have sadly found out. I'm not sure how else we could secure the trays.

Hope your other girls are ok and not too traumatised.

[Jigsaw1711]

We've now tried to secure the trays with bungee type rope/clips wrapped around the roosting bars. I hope this works as we are so devasted that this could haopen. Seems unbelievable! We've also emailed Omlet as I think they need to make the trays more secure.

There's scratches all over the roof of the cube, he must have been trying to think of ways to get in! Our poor chickys, they seem so miserable bless them, what an ordeal x

[Ain't Nobody Here]

Poor things . Sounds like you've done all you can to make things secure so I hope you can sleep easy in your beds now .

[Guest]

I am so sorry you have had this horrible trauma.

 

To be honest I too have often worried about the trays security but always assumed they were too high for a fox to reach from the ground. Obviously that is not the case. I feel the lip at the end of the poop tray should be higher to retain the bedding material, shove the tray in too hard and the product falls off the end which then stops the tray being shoved home properly.

 

While I do love many of my Omlet products I do feel many problems are just swept under the carpet by them, the blooming cube ladder being one, the fact the cube wheels cant be engaged by one pers

on is another.

[sandyhas3chucks]

i have a weldmesh panel strapped over the poo tray. also paronoid, have a like a luggage srtap around cube holding similar over egg port..

[The Dogmother]

Sorry to hear that. I had something similar happen many years ago with my Classic; the upper shell of the Classic lifts (or used to) up at the back so there's a gap of about 1.5-2" between that and the base. One of my pekins was taken like this.. she was dead inside the Eglu.