When a hungry fox snuck into a chicken pen at an agriculture school in northwestern France, it got a lot more than it bargained for.
On their morning rounds Thursday, students at Le Gros Chêne school in Brittany found the fox's lifeless, mutilated body lying in the corner of the pen.
"There, in the corner, we found this dead fox," Pascal Daniel, the head of farming at the school, told the Agence France-Presse news agency. "There was a herd instinct and they attacked him with their beaks."
The fox is believed to have become trapped inside the chicken pen by light-controlled sensors that close the doors when the sun goes down, leaving it at the mercy of the angry mob.
Some of the 6,000 birds ganged up on the fox and pecked it to death. "I found him pecked by the chickens," Daniel told French radio station RTL.
"These are chickens which live in the open and are used to fighting against buzzards. So, when the fox entered the chicken pen, they made the most of getting rid of him, and the fox found himself trapped."
The chickens, in a group, wedged him in a corner and attacked him until the fox's stomach was completely pecked."
Daniel noted that chickens may have turned up en masse and surprised the "young and inexperienced" fox.
He told the radio station that the chickens have been in their pens since July and have "learnt how to defend themselves" over the space of seven months.
The luckless fox is not the chickens' first victim; the students regularly find "devoured" pigeons in the pen as well.
Nevertheless, Daniel said the formidable birds are not to be feared, describing them "very lively," spending most of their time outdoors on the organic farm.
They may have learned from the fate of their predecessors -- a visit from a fox 18 months ago ended much less happily for the chickens, Daniel said.
CNN has contacted the school for comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment