In a long-term survival scenario, livestock can be one of your most valuable assets. Even a few chickens can give you a reliable supply of eggs and meat, and if you have the space for larger livestock there are even more benefits.
Keeping some animals will make a huge difference in your diet, and it’s something every prepper should consider. If you have the room to grow crops, you can have at least small livestock too.
Livestock does have a disadvantage, though – it’s portable. A thief might steal vegetables from your garden, but he can’t take the garden itself; that’s still going to be available to you, and you can plant more vegetables (and beef up your security). If your animals get stolen, though, that’s it – they’re gone.
Unfortunately, in a crisis, livestock theft is a very real threat. Whether it’s a starving refugee grabbing a chicken from your yard, or a more serious thief looking for some cows to give himself a long-term milk supply, there will be plenty of people willing to steal your animals if they get the chance.
There’s also a risk that government or other agencies could confiscate livestock in a crisis. I’ve never really worried about the government coming after my food stockpile – when they can just requisition stockyards, grain silos and food processing plants, I don’t think they’ll be too interested by what’s in my root cellar – but there are some other risks attached to animals.
However, if you are concerned about the government or looters coming for your stockpile, you can learn here how to build an invisible root cellar. This way, you will know for sure that your supplies are well hidden.
How To Hide Your Animals
Obviously your livestock is much less likely to get taken from you if it’s concealed; people can’t steal or confiscate something they can’t find.
The question is how do you conceal it? Animals can be quite conspicuous, after all. Some of them are large. Others need specialized buildings.
And they’re not just visible; they’re often conspicuous by their noise and smell, too. So how do you go about hiding them? A lot of that’s going to depend on what sort of animals we’re talking about.
Poultry And Rabbits
Chickens and rabbits are the easiest to keep, and they’re also very useful. Chickens supply meat and eggs, especially when you feed them this plant, which can double egg production. Rabbits are a fast-growing source of protein that costs almost nothing to feed. They’re also the simplest to conceal.
Chickens need a coop to live in, and rabbits are usually kept in hutches. The simplest way to hide these structures is to disguise them as a shed. It doesn’t take much; some simple board walls and a tarpaper roof will do it.
Locate them in the least obvious spot you can – in your back yard is ideal, out of sight of anyone passing by. A chicken coop close behind your house is going to be pretty inconspicuous. If you can’t put it out of sight, making it look like an old, flimsy shed (not the sort you’d store anything valuable in) will hide the fact there’s livestock in it.
Of course you’ll need to let your chickens or rabbits out, so they can forage for food and get some exercise. To keep them out of sight, fence in their run with chicken wire – remembering to bury the lower edge at least 18” deep if you have rabbits, to prevent them digging their way out – then hide the fence by planting bushes or other plants.
Bamboo is a fast-growing plant that can quickly hide anything you want hidden, but some species need a lot of maintenance to stop them spreading. Look for a non-invasive species that doesn’t send out underground runners.
With rabbits, you really just have to keep them out of sight; they don’t make any noise, and there isn’t a lot of smell either.
Chickens are more of a problem, because they can make a fair bit of noise even if you don’t have a rooster. Screening their exercise area with plants will absorb some of the noise, but all you can really do is keep chickens as far away from the boundaries of your property as possible.
Related: These Are the Best Chicken Breeds for Preppers
Chickens can also get smelly if you don’t keep their coop clean, so if you want them to be unobtrusive you need to clean them out regularly and prevent their droppings from building up.
As far as roosters and geese go, you’re not going to keep them quiet. On the plus side, geese aren’t easy to steal – and in fact they’re a great natural alarm system, because if they spot an intruder they’ll make a real racket.
Pigs
Pigs are a lot bigger and noisier than small livestock, and they’re much harder to hide. You can still make them less conspicuous, though.
Keep pigsties as far from roads as possible.
Avoid the standard Quonset hut-style shelters that most pig farms use now.
Keep your pigs in a building that looks as much like a shed as possible, and use hedges or other plants to screen their outdoor area from passers by.
If you have a wooded area, you could always keep the pigs in it and fence it off. That works really well if you have oak trees; the pigs will fatten up nicely on fallen acorns. Unfortunately there isn’t a lot you can do about the oinking and smell. That’s a pity, because pigs are great livestock for a smallholding.
Cattle And Horses
If you keep large animals there are serious limits on what you can do to conceal them. For horses, it’s practically impossible. They’re big and active, and need a lot of open space. To protect them you’re likely going to have to rely on other security measures, because hiding them isn’t really an option.
Related: Security Mistakes You’re Probably Making On Your Property
For cattle the situation isn’t quite as bad. They’re still big and need lots of space, but they’re less active and don’t need so much exercise. If you have woods on your land, a grassy clearing with a fence round it can give enough grazing for a cow or two. Otherwise, just keep them as far away from roads as possible.
As well as hiding your animals as well as possible, make sure to conceal associated items. If you have a big pile of sacks marked “chicken feed”, anyone who sees them will probably manage to work out you have chickens somewhere around.
Start hiding livestock early – like now. Don’t post photos of your chicken coop on social media. Don’t talk about how well your animals are doing to people you hardly know. Don’t set up an egg stall right outside your front gate.
Maybe none of the people who know you have animals would think about stealing them now, but those same people might change their minds if the SHTF, they’re starving and they remember that time you posted a photo of 50 rabbits on Facebook. Like any other prep, livestock will be better protected if other people don’t know about it.
And, just as you shouldn’t let everyone know about your livestock, it’s better if they don’t know about your garden either. Try keeping your vegetable garden as far from sight as possible. You can even build this hidden food-growing fence, which is very effective in protecting your veggies from prying eyes
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Backyard chickens especially new chickens starting out laying eggs do the chicken song. This could signal where they are in SHTF of some hungry illegal, criminal or neighbor by your home.
Certain animals will make sounds that are hard to muffle or camouflage in a suburban setting.
Hiding a vegetable garden can be tricky in a city to outer reaches of a city limit suburban home. Sometimes a guerrilla type camouflage of gardening could be used even in your front yard.
Reasons to have a dog. You have to sleep some time.
Or Guineas. Those are good watch dogs too.
Guineas are hard to keep around.. they like to wander and have no interest in ‘staying home’…
If you are the smartphone social media type, long after post SHTF posting your assets on trick toke, fish back, gaagle platforms. Starving people will find you, the benefits of your past postings you will get new friends unannounced.
This is just one reason why I do not have any unsociable media. I email or text. That’s it. All those gossip things and keepers to me is just plain stupid. Many of these have replaced meeting with other humans. People watch church now instead of being there. I have told anxiety ridden people get off all of those and the horrified look is sad. They will get bullied but stay on there. I may get bullied every day, but I won’t know that because I’m not on there. That is my recommendation is to disable your site. If you’re on there that has pictures of what you’re doing. People also tell me I only use Facebook to keep up with people I knew from high school. You have a phone. Do that old-fashioned thing called talking. if you want to trade pictures, print them and write a letter. If you write a letter to someone and mail it to them and they will do it back. It is a joy and excitement that is hard to explain a letter. I am deaf. I can’t talk on the phone. I write actually type paper letters and people tell me they got it and they have a big smile or they will actually write me back and a lot of them will email me yes. Delete your online presence as much as possible. Don’t send pictures or share your details as much as possible.
Let’s be real China is rotting this country into poverty and weaken our fighting spirit by feminizing our military and the general public.
Notice how we have female singers screeching out songs on the airwaves. We used to have male singers singing songs with testosterone voices, no longer we got feminized men.
A big national security problem.
Military age illegals broke through our National Guard ranks at the border tearing down razor wire. Build the dam wall, drill for oil and deport.
We have China puppet Manchurian JOE Bindenomics steering our country into the abyss of a submissive America to China. Will you liberals vote for a Demoncrat like uncle Ho Joe or vote for a true American conservative?
Are we at the tipping point or going off the rapids plunging into unrecoverable disaster, a point of no return of America as we know it?
The old and retired vets are not happy as illegals are getting our social security benefits that will bankrupt our paid for retirement supplements we need not the Biden illegals.
Horses on the highway, the chair is by the wall, the reds are here.
The CCP are suing an American city, we got George Soros and Son do nothing DA’s prosecuting honest citizens for jail, like the Jan6th.
If you have the feed you can keep your stock in the barn or an enclosure close to your house. TEOTWAWKI also means the farm store will run dry pretty quick. Very few people are prepared to grow grain to feed their animals or have enough pasture. Horses on good grass, about 2 acres per horse, about one beef per acre of good grass. Or raise a couple acres of corn per animal. Early Texas homesteaders kept a milk cow and a bunch of pigs and raised corn for the animals and for bread. Corn bread and bacon, pretty good stuff. Even the small farmers, though, had the labor of one or two slaves and a mule to pull the plow.
Most people are not in rural areas the population is more located in suburban to country locations. So keeping animals in a barn is not a choice.
Many will need a different set of tactics.
As we see the National Guard in El Paso,Texas, will need to up their game. Put the old vets on the border and there will no problems other than kicking out the religious NGO’s who have caused a lot of the problems of illegals here.
These military age males don’t give a dam about respecting our country whatsoever.
There are no slaves or plantation owners and reparations are a joke. These Neo grifters of Black heritage are no longer tied to the cotton picking south.
The ones in California demand payment but California was never a slave state period.
The Marxist love to pick open healed sores just to drive division among Americans.
China Joe paid a homage to the grand wizard’s funeral of senator.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s eulogy of the late Senator Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan leader. The Demoncrats have always been linked to the KKK and abortion, mainly killing off the Black population.
Why do Blacks vote Demoncrat when the Dems brutalized them for decades?
It started when Hoover stranded tens thousands of Mississippi sharecroppers atop the levees during the flood of 1927, the plantation owners demanded he not evacuate their labor force. Running for President in 1928 he promised angry black leaders to make it up to them if they helped elect him. They did help, he was elected and told them to go to hell. Then FDR came along and started the money train, Truman desegregated the military, LBJ rammed the Civil Rights Act through Congress and George Wallace invented the Southern Strategy of appealing to white voters angry over desegregation, a strategy the Republican party has continued to this day.
A companion question would be, why are Republicans so fond of State’s Rights these days when it was Lincoln who declared the Federal Government Sovereign over all?
I live in San Diego and this morning on my regular walk saw three Haitians standing the corner of my walk. Two tall skinny males and a woman on Biden’s giveaway smartphone. Said morning to one guy he couldn’t speak English the other tow speaking a foriegn tongue looking for directions to a safe house.
I usually carry a knife but now thinking a small pocket gun might be the ticket.
Heard something about Haitians and Cannibalism in their country.
Russia today has another mass shooting of 40 dead and 100 hurt, kind of like what happen a few years ago with Muslim terrorists there.
Radical female Black judge giving illegals rights to carry guns while the Bidenomics is trying to disarm us.
The recent illegals crashing the border in Texas through the razor wire are upping their game too. Defend our 2A!
I am more concerned about looters shooting livestock (e,g, dairy cows) cutting off a ham and running, leaving the rest to rot…which is why they will have to be stopped before they shoot. This I feel is unfortunately the more likely scenario for looters. Keeping them out of sight during the day, and put up in the barn at night is the most likely countermeasure…along with one’s ability to engage targets, even at night, at targets further than 90% of shooter’s I meet. Oh yeah, I’m already there!
For the rest of us who don’t live in gated communities or HOA’s we still have lunatics running the show. Every election the liberals or lefties go to the center of politics and lie about being conservative, then go back to liberalism, what joke.
We wouldn’t have a problem if Dumbo’s would quit voting for the same liberals expecting a different outcome, real insanity.
A friend in La Mesa, CA told me the city with no input from the voting taxpayers are getting bike lanes put on both sides of their road. The funny thing is rarely do they see any bicyclers on that road.
California is reducing car roads to one lane for both two way traffic, they want the citizens to be good little Chinese to walk and bike, even disabled citizens.
This is America, but these politicians are taking their orders from China’s CCP.
Why should preppers or the average American who has a brain left, have to head for the hills or because of SHTF?
Why not make those liberals leave instead of us, bring the pressure on them, bring the fight to them, check their posts out, it’s time to turn the tables ASAP!
Living near a road (paved or gravel) makes it very easy for people passing by to see what you have on your property. That has been my experience, and I am still working hard to hide my outdoor stuff.
Hi.. I’m interested in the ‘Chickens supply meat and eggs, especially when you feed them this plant,’ except the link goes to the Forager’s Guide to Wild Food and there is no mention of any foods for chickens… Also interested in forages safe for rabbits.. a number of the usually cited kitchen scraps tend to reduce lactation. I do know that they like cuttings from the rose family (in moderation.. good for treats, but not regular feed – I keep my invasive Himalayan blackberrries at bay harvesting ‘treats’.) I also forage and encourage various native wide bladed grasses and oak and maple leaves. Start by indroducing small quantities.
Is a silver round worth a chicken, or several ?
Just curious what you’d do with all the maire. You take it from the coop or hutch and put it where? Garbage trucks don’t run so it piles up in the alley? Second thing, I spent my career life in LE. The bandits always came down the alley so it’s not any more secure than the front. Thirdly is water, most people don’t put in extra for the critters. Hogs don’t sweat so some way to keep them cool in warmer climes with the power grid down along with the plumbing. For those with no experience large stock (cows, horses) can drink 30 gallons or more a day. If you do have a well do you have a way to pump with no electric. This article made me 😆