We live in a pretty rural area of NW Arkansas. My nearest neighbor is ½ mile away, and all the neighbors are mostly more than a mile apart after him. in between, there’s nothing but mountains and woods and cow pastures. All those woods give a much needed corridor for wildlife like bears and cougars, who don’t like being near people if they can help it, a way to get from one end of their territory to others. So far, they don’t bother us and we don’t bother them. HOWEVER, if I didn’t have good guardian dogs, that would likely be a different story because the predators would indeed come calling for my chickens, at least, and maybe even small children wandering too far from the house by themselves... but I don’t have any really small children. my youngest child is 10 and he doesn’t roam off on foot too far by himself. He’s not allowed to go up the mountain by himself, mainly because everywhere up there is out of earshot and it’s way too steep for him to go on the 4-wheeler without his older brother. And there’s lots of rattlesnakes and he’s not that good at spotting them on the trail, lol. Up the mountain is where the wild things live, and the ginseng. When ~I ~ go hiking, I go sooooo slow, looking at this and that, it’s hard to actually startle much. And if I got bitten, I would know to not run home as fast as I can, haha. At least I say that now, but I’ve never been bitten! The dogs don’t go far from the house, but they will run to the valley for the horse’s aid if they see or hear a coyote over there, or anything threatening of that sort. The land is set up so that it’s easy to hear and sometimes see what’s in the valley from sitting on the hill in front of the house, even though it’s a long ways across if you were walking. He can go over there alone to fish in the pond because it’s in good earshot.