So... I was raised for a while on a 3 generation compound with quite the animal menagerie, including chickens. I can imagine a situation where the chickens are

So... I was raised for a while on a 3 generation compound with quite the animal menagerie, including chickens. I can imagine a situation where the chickens are entirely confined. Ok, we never did that. For us, the roosters flew to the high branches of the quite large grapefruit trees. There they were mostly safe, and were of course expendable anyway. The hens (sometimes ducks) were locked up nightly in a rather carefully built hen house completely enclosed in a chickewire box. Maybe 20'x10'x10'. You could walk around in it no problem, along with the 10 or so chickens and the roost box. This was on the edge of the Everglades in S. Florida. We had a variety of varmints. The varmints occasionally breached the defences. Repairs were occasionally required. Losses happened. That's what I wonder about entirely confined chickens, while granting varmints more or less unlimited time to work on the problem. What's the difference? And there's that "recently" word lurking in my parent... we'll see what the spillover effects are. I'm going to add that I've had a box turtle for 27 years, and my last cat lasted 16 years. And we have traveled multiple weeks multiple times a year for decades. I am all in favor of personal enslavement to an agrarian fantasy. For many years my wife the master gardener has besieged me (the cook) with the fruit of her 5 raised beds. It took us about 4 tries to get through a summer (in AZ at 5500') without having to monitor/water the garden semi daily. We fixed that, with occasional failure. However, you have to concede significant losses if you travel around harvest season: stuff really wants to leap off the plants in a timely manner. So... all I am saying is that this is not a simple game if it lasts for a significant part of your lifetime, if you want to travel.