Is this a good reason to get geese?

Free Feather said:

Just great.

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Yeah, not the best situation. Perhaps tell your mother this and tell her that if she wants to get geese, she needs to build them a nice secure pen or she's risking both them and your dog getting injured? Maybe then she'll reconsider. I know I wouldn't want to get an animal knowing the chances are good it will just be injured or killed. It's awful to get attached and then lose them that way.

I get that the puppy will play rougher than the chickens can handle. Hence the geese.
Basically I have no idea what to do. I guess every five minutes I will show her the chickens and flip out if she acts like she wants them. Nothing is working, because I am failing. I have to figure it out or Mother is going to send Clover away.

Pyxis, I did not see your reply before I posted.
Love your hoop coop, by the way. It was a main inspiration for mine.
I am sick of losing birds. I guess no geese.

It's hard to train them to leave the poultry alone, but it can be done. When I first got my ducks, I'm sure the dog would have killed them if he could. After training him that they were to be left alone, I then got chickens, and he never seriously hurt them, but I did catch him with my bantam in his mouth once. So that had to be trained away. I just thank goodness he's part retriever and has a soft mouth or that could have easily been fatal to her. Now, he's never killed poultry, but he probably would have had I not introduced them slowly. Now his only bad behavior towards them is occasionally running at them to make them scatter, and I'm trying to train that out of him. He also knows not to go in the chicken run, and will not go in there even if it's wide open for free ranging and no one's around. So it's hard, but with patience and time, you may be able to do it. In the meantime, though, NEVER let her alone unsupervised with your poultry. It'll just give her time to reinforce her bad habits.

Thanks for the hoop coop compliment! I still love it to death. I have a second one now with legbars in it. They're great coops!

Huh. I really wish I had known to do it slowly before. I was so confident, and look at what that caused. All my fault.
She has only killed chicks. She scatters the adults. You can see she wants to herd. I thought she was done with killing since it had been so long. Then she got loose...

What I would do is have her in the house and bring a chicken in for her to see while you are holding it. Let her sniff it and see it, and if she starts to get too interested, scold her. Repeat this until she is disinterested and calm. Then reward the behavior with praise and treats. Repeat this several times until she is no longer showing any untoward interest to the chicken when you are holding it. Then, put the chicken carefully on the ground, with you very nearby to intervene if anything happens, and repeat. You'll need a really calm chicken for this. Then try again outside. Give her more and more space between you and the chicken until you think it's fine to leave her alone with them. Inside the house first because that's not the element she's used to chasing and killing them in, and that might put her in a different mindset to start with. After she's good with the chickens, move onto chicks, since this seems to be what her main problem is, and repeat the same procedure with them. The idea here is to teach her that showing too much interest in them gets her in trouble and causes bad things to happen, while ignoring them leads to good things. Then if you can really get her under control, train her to herd and get her some runner ducks I'll be doing that when I get my border collie puppy.

Anyway, this is what worked with my dog, but like I said he never actually killed a bird, so it might be a lot harder with your girl.

So it would not work if the chicken pecks her when I hold it?

Free Feather said:

So it would not work if the chicken pecks her when I hold it?

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Might actually work better. Get too close, experience pain. That would be good negative reinforcement. My dog never got too close to a broody with chicks again after the time my broody silkie flew right into his face. That was enough for him. As long as you don't think she'd react violently to being pecked, or think it was a fun game or something. I would pick the calmest chicken you have for this reason, and see if you avoid having her get pecked.