I agree with your chicken article. I have used most of these methods (not cage method) and agree with your conclusions. I have raised them in town, and rurally. We have a huge coyote problem here you hear them crying every night and found them with a den of pups in an old shed but Dad is afraid of dogs and will not permit one here. My children and I have not finished building our homes and live in an assortment of camps; The outhouse is our bathroom, unless we want to walk down to Dad's house. I had all of my boys use the fenceline to urinate. Us girls hide out at the other side of the property by the trees. I had a bumb-blind lamb that cried all the time and a flock of chickens and the coyotes did not pass the urine line to bother the animals. The feral cats ventured off into coyote land and the coyote's have kept the feral cat population down, but have not bothered the chickens, goats or sheep.
One coyote would wait in the bushes down from our property and stock my little grandchildren attempting to attack them when they would go down the driveway past the urine fence line to the school bus. That coyote was-- shall we say 'relocated'.
In one place I lived in town with chickens, I had a black kitten that grew up with the chickens and she nested with the hens setting on eggs and took a turn when they got down to eat. In the dim light of the coop, I was startled the first time I reached for eggs and felt fur instead of feathers. She did not bother the chicks and defended the chickens from rats and met her doom defending the chickens from an opossum. She won the battle, but died from her wounds.
After hurricane Rita destroyed my fence, the surviving three got loose and became permanently free range and the neighbors loved them and named them and fed them and found surprise eggs in their gardens until they met their demise by someone's dog.
