BRITTANY, FRANCE — Have you heard the one about the fox that snuck into the chicken coop?
Let’s just say it didn’t end well for the fox.
It’s believed that the fox entered the henhouse at an agricultural school at dusk in early March, ending up trapped inside by light-controlled automatic hatch doors that close when the sun goes down. Once inside, the hunter became the hunted.
Students at Le Gros Chene school in Brittany discovered the body of the animal when making their rounds to check on the chickens the following morning.
“There, in the corner, we found this dead fox,” Pascal Daniel, head of farming at the school, told the AFP. “There was a herd instinct and they attacked him with their beaks.”
The free-range, organic farm where the incident took place has a chicken coop that is open all day, and the hens spend most of the daytime outside unless they’re laying eggs.
The last time a fox visited one of the school’s chicken coops, more than a year ago, it turned out much worse for the hens, said Daniel.