Chickens 'gang up' to kill intruder fox on French farm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47551786 Version 0 of 1. Chickens in a school farm in north-western France are believed to have grouped and killed a juvenile fox. The unusual incident in Brittany took place after the fox entered the coop with 3,000 hens through an automatic hatch door which closed immediately. "There was a herd instinct and they attacked him with their beaks," said Pascal Daniel, head of farming at the agricultural school Gros-ChĂȘne. The body of the small fox was found the following day in a corner of the coop. "It had blows to its neck, blows from beaks," Mr Daniel told AFP news agency. The farm is home to up to 6,000 free-range chickens who are kept in a five-acre site. The coop is kept open during day and most of the hens spend the daytime outside, AFP adds. You may also like: When the automatic door closed, the fox - thought to be around five or six months old - became trapped inside. "A whole mass of hens can arrive together and the fox may have panicked in the face of such a big number", Mr Daniel told the regional newspaper Ouest France (in French). "They can be quite tenacious when they are in a pack". |