We just purchased 5 Pomeranian goslings. They are 3 days old and 2 weeks old. The breeder told us not to make pets of them. He said they would end up bonding to us and then later that would cause aggressive behavior. He told us the best way to raise them was just to let them be at a distance all the time from you.
It's good to let them get away from you if they're terrified of you but permanently keeping them at a distance as a method of animal husbandry I would not recommend. It makes it very hard and stressful to treat them for anything that requires more than adding something to feed or water.
This sort of statement actually tends to reflect more on the breeder than the breed, generally speaking, but there are significant differences between species and what is allowable and acceptable from one species may be a serious issue with another. Geese are very intelligent and family oriented and training them is obviously different from chickens but there's quite a few similarities.
Keeping them from imprinting on you is something I'm on the fence about...
Some people let them imprint, and have no problems, others obviously swear by not letting them imprint, and have no problems, and then there are the people from both groups who do what is 'right' yet have problems.
I think it depends mainly on the animal in question, as an individual, and the way their most recent ancestors were raised. If they were aggressive birds dominated by either not handling/imprinting, or managed by the opposite method, I'd guess you'd need to carry on the tradition so to speak to get best results. I suspect this may be similar to rooster handling, where some swear by not handling roosters and some swear by handling them, and neither group is 100% right in 100% of cases. Personally I wouldn't keep a male I couldn't handle.
It should go without saying that you need to not be submissive to them at any point but it takes a good working understanding of their body language and social structures to understand what is actually submission, what's just decent social manners, and what's domination. An aggressive animal should be culled, not bred, and breeding it on just gives you this same old story generation after generation. It can eventually be bred out but in the interim generations the aggressive animals are making your life, or other animals' lives, unreasonably troublesome.
It may be very applicable to not handle/imprint in breeds where for example most breeding males are sourced from the AI industry, so for thousands of generations both males and females have come to identify humans as mates, so both attempting to mate with humans and attacking humans as competitors is therefore natural to them.
Asides from that, as a general rule of thumb with any domestic animal, their aggression or lack thereof to humans is not dependent on breed or gender, it is dependent on the breeder/s who reared the last few generations and how they did it.
I have done a little internet research and don't see yet any solid corroboration of this. Perhaps just following some good dominance practices later will solve the geese trying to dominate you? I completely agree with the thread on how to raise male geese
https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/561849/geese-training#post_7245388.
There's some good advice in that thread but even the best advice is useless if it doesn't apply to your animal so I'd guess you'd just need to test and see what gets you the best results. Personally I treat males like any other animal, though I do watch closer just in case with some, but so far it's not been an issue. But I do cull for the first sign of bullying or excessive aggression or attempt to dominate humans, although the smarter the species the more leeway they get at least in the early stages of attempting to dominate, when there are no actual attacks, just testing the waters... Because that's a natural part of growing up for some of them, you test the resident alphas. Kind of like the initially harmless things puppies do while finding out if you're really the boss. Since your breeder has already shown you how they manage their animals, it's a safe bet you will have to follow the path they have paved with this strain or family line, or you won't get acceptable results.
Does anyone else have information or tips from their experiences? We would love to interact and make pets of the geese. They are fascinating creatures who seem very intelligent and we don't want to have them constantly at a great distance from us. I have ideas of taking them around with me to the front lawn and garden to help me weed and to hang out...
I had some geese, mongrels, from random backgrounds, which I found not-ideal livestock because they were so socially bonded to one another that making some family members mysteriously vanish really screwed with their peace of mind, lol... so I no longer keep geese.
But most of mine were from tamed and imprinted backgrounds, and some were aggressive to humans, and some were friendly. Two of those were brothers from the same clutch raised the same, but they were like night and day, a good example of the differences of character having a strong influence on whether they are able to be managed like pets or like dangerous livestock.
The females were much the same. Some were from semi-wild backgrounds, some were tamed, and this had little to no impact on their behavior towards humans, you got friendly and aggressive ones from both backgrounds.
Whatever you breed on is what you will deal with in future, so be careful about what animals you use as the foundation for your flock as they will shape it for generations to come no matter what you do to try to change the offspring. This is true whether you separate the offspring to rear away from the parents, or let them rear them. It's especially true for animals that train their offspring.
Best wishes.
