Raising Chickens

As a family we have been trying to come up with a family mission, a common goal that we could all work together for. We all decided that we would enjoy raising some chickens, just to kinda get our feet wet and teach the children responsibility, diligence, hard work, and also have a lot of fun with it too. We're currently on round two with this family experiment, we originally what 12 chickens and 2 turkeys. We didn't have anywhere to “brood” them so we set up shop in our living room. We set up one of those large storage totes and put a heat lamp in it. I loved having them in the house, the kids played with them and fed them. After about 5 weeks though we moved them to my father in-laws garage and upgraded them to a cattle feeding troff. Two weeks later we turned them loose into their pin we had fixed up. That night something killed 3 of them. Here I am trying to work on character building with my children and I fail, oh I got hot about that. It had to be somebody's fault. That afternoon I went around and made sure nothing could get in or out of that hen house. Next morning, I go out to see how good I did... something had not only killed all the rest of my chickens but made a night of it, seeing as how none of them could get out. He picked them clean. Everyone was discouraged, especially me (like I said I fail often, but Lord willing I'm going to fail forward). So for the next two weeks I was determined to eliminate all forms of chicken eating life from our lil' town. I set a live trap every night, and every night I caught a tom cat or a coon or something. I did this till I couldn't catch nothing else. So now we have twenty chickens, they're about 6 weeks old and looking good, I'm struggling with being short about them. I found I'm being a little over protective of them, as much as I cherish the idea of building life skills in my children by allowing them to help and encouraging them to explore this little fowl things, I loath the idea of loosing. I won't be beat by a stinking tom cat again.