Geese training?

[Atrayou]

Okay so here is the thing.....my 2 geese have been handled and interacted with on a daily basis....BUT a few days ago my Gander bit me on the back of the calf and left a good bruise~! Now usually when he gets all excited and wants to bite we pick him up and let him calm down. I am not sure if it was the sandals I had on because they were silver and sparkly or what it was but he would try to nip at them and when I moved my feet he became more agressive. Kind of like he thought it was a game. My husband is out there with them all the time he sits on the lawn with them and he pets them etc. I sometimes feel he is teasing them without realizing it. Last night everytime Romeo tried to nip at me I would very carefully put my hand around his neck and use the other hand to scratch him.....what are we doing wrong??? I have tried to make myself big and flap my arms and back him up it does not work....my fear is IF they mate I am going to have a very mean critter on my hands.
Any advise on geese training and imprinting? I Love them to pieces but their little love pecks have become more then that....is picking him up the right thing to do??? Please help me because I do not want o become afraid of this Gander.....I really want to be able to interact with him and be comfortable. They follow me like dogs and he eats out of my hand etc. All of a sudden he has my female getting a bit aggressive....Oh and did I mention how loud he gets???? Holy Smack~!!!
I need a few pointers so I can do my yard work and not have him chewing on me. I don't mine the friendly pecks but he gets out of control to the point of me wanting to kick him and I don't want to do that......just want him to stop with the aggresion that has come out of nowhere.
Thanks~!!!

 

[Olive Hill]

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First things first. Don't make excuses for him. The sandals very well could have been what caught his eye. It doesn't matter. His behavior is unacceptable. I don't care if you were wearing giant hot pink goose eating slippers with 4 carat diamond encrusted soles he is not to be aggressive with you for any reason at any time. Period. No excuses.

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How so?

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Treating him like a rare fragile treasure rather than potentially dangerous livestock.

Do not scratch him. KICK HIS BUTT! Literally if you have to.

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He knows you're bluffing. How does it not work? He doesn't back down? And then what do you do?

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Step one: do not imprint a gander onto a human. You're way past that, unfortunately. Step two is to not bluff. You absolutely, positively MUST follow through. You must have every intention of putting him in his place by whatever means necessary whenever he challenges you. Every time he calls your bluff and wins it confirms that he is alpha to you.

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First, stop anthropomorphizing the bird. They're not love pecks, they're dominance pecks. He is exerting dominance over you. Nothing more, nothing less. Second, stop feeding him out of your hand. You will never see a goose lower on the gaggle hierarchy being allowed to freely eat out of any area that "belongs" at that moment to one of his superiors. You are telling the bird he is your boss.

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She too thinks you're lower on the hierarchy. As for the noise. Yep. Geese. Louder than train whistles. LOL! Nothing you can do about that, really.

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There is no such thing as friendly pecks, those are just the small pecks that he used to test the water to find out whether or not you were dominant to him. You allowed it, he confirmed he is, in fact, alpha and now he dominates you as he pleases.

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Good! Use that frustration. Stand up, get BIG, spread your wings and DEMAND your space. I guarantee, based on what you've typed here, if I saw you do this in person I would tell you you were not big enough and mean enough. Get bigger, get meaner and most of all FOLLOW THROUGH. If he comes back at you, you have to go back at him 10 times harder. If it gets physical and you have to grab him you do not "carefully" put your hand around his neck, you grab on sweep him up and hold him hard, very firmly pin his wings down. You have to mean business. You are not going to hurt that gander. Put some force behind whatever you do with him.

Some people come by this naturally. They have dominant personalities, they demand respect with their presence. Others don't. You may simply be one that needs to work at it. Good Luck!

 

[Olive Hill]

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One only needs to observe a gaggle of geese interacting with one another to know what they do and do not understand.

Geese will not understand if you randomly haul off and whack them, but that goes for any animal and I've yet to see anyone advocate such a thing here. Geese will understand if you get physical with them in the same way that they get physical with each other.

A goose fight almost always begins the same way. One goose, whom either believes himself alpha to or wish to be alpha to another, hands out discipline for a behavioral infraction. It may be that Goose A believed Goose B grazed too close to him, or Goose B may have walked between Goose A and his favorite mate. Whatever the infraction Goose A disciplines Goose B. This may be a nip, it may be a snaked neck and a wing spread, it may be a hiss. Whatever the discipline Goose B has two choices. 1) He may accept it and obey by refraining from the behavior in question (and generally removing himself from Goose A's immediate vicinity) or 2) he may challenge Goose A to exert his own dominance thereby proving his actions were not wrong -- the dominant goose does as he pleases and therefore, if Goose B proves HE is, infact, dominant then his behavior was not punishable.

So lets stop here and relate this to a human goose interaction. Say you have a Gander, who we will simply call Gander for the purpose of this exercise. You are weeding your flowerbed when Gander nips you. Here we have Goose A disciplining Goose B. This means that Gander either believes himself alpha to you or wishes to be alpha to you and has chosen this opportunity to try to exert that dominance. You have two choices. You can accept the discipline by not effectively reminding him of the true hierarchy of your relationship. Or you can put him in his place. Obviously we know the appropriate choice here. You need to challenge his discipline to determine, in no uncertain terms, that you are alpha to him.

So lets go back to our goose on goose interaction. Goose B has decided that he will challenge Goose A's discipline. What does he do here? He meets Goose A's advance with an equal advance of his own. Usually this is the point in the interaction where wings begin to spread and necks snake. Goose B snakes his neck and spreads his wings at Goose A. This says "You may NOT discipline ME!"

So lets go back to a human goose interaction at this point. This is why I always encourage people to spread their arms, posture and snake their neck as the first line of defense against an advancing Gander. This is what he understands as the first step in a challenge to him. This gives him the option to back down before the interaction must escalate to a physical one. Many, many, many ganders will stop right here. They are bluffers, those geese. They like to talk a big game, but are not often prepared to actually play the game they talk. But what if he doesn't?

If Goose A decides not to back down when Goose B does not accept his discipline this is the point at which their interaction gets physical. They will dance around at one another, much like boxers in a ring, until one sees an opening to grab the other by the base of the neck. Once one grabs on, they both grab on.

Now, it's not really reasonable for you to be dancing around in a circle with a goose waiting for an opening to grab him by the base of the neck so you can beat the tar out of him with your "wings" (we'll get to the beat the tar out of one another portion in a moment). It's also not fair to the goose because you don't have a base of the neck at his level onto which HE can grab. So what's a goose owner to do? Look at what comes next in the goose to goose interaction.

Once they have ahold of one another, before the beating begins, what happens in this natural position? Their chests bump. Hard.

So what can you do that he will understand as the second step in a challenge? Bump his chest. Hard. This is also why blunt toed boots are excellent foot wear for chores. A good, hard chest bump tells the gander you will fight him over this. He understands it, it the normal progression in a challenge. It also mimics the natural dynamic between two geese as when you bump him he will be tossed back a little bit, losing his ground on you. When two geese are bumping one another it causes them to occasionally lose their grip on the opposing goose.

What happens if the chest bump isn't sufficient? Do it again. It would truly be a rare gander that would escalate an interaction to the bump stage and then not follow through after just one bump. In a goose on goose fight they will repeatedly bump and push one another with their chests. I, personally will bump up to five or six times before taking it further. This, imo, also mimics their natural progression. It also gives him ample opportunity to rethink his actions.

But what if he doesn't? What comes after the chest bump? Here's where the goose on goose action gets ugly. What comes after chest bumping, to put it bluntly, is beating the ever loving poop out of one another with their wings. This can take a long time, is likely to result in many large bruises and sometimes only ends when one or both geese are literally so exhausted they cannot possibly carry on.

I do not recommend getting into a wing beating match with a goose. It will hurt. And the bruises will last for weeks. I have never been in a wing beating match with a goose but I have had to break up wing beating matches between geese and the size and severity of the bruises I can assure you are not worth engaging them in the exact language they speak. Instead, like the grabbing onto the base of the neck, we need to look just a little bit further in the fight to see what happens. Now, some goose fights resolve themselves during the wing beating match. Those are usually the less evenly matched fights. Your goose does not realize he is not evenly matched with you however, so it's okay if we ignore those fights and focus on the fights that progress to the sheer exhaustion stage. In these fights the beating continues for what seems like forever, when one or both (usually both in an evenly matched fight) begins to tire it slows, they start throwing those chest bumps they used in the beginning back into the mix as it's less taxing and eventually one goose will fully pin down the other. In essence, whichever goose is more exhausted ends up pinned -- and therefore the loser. The pinning goes on for a few seconds to a minute, however long the winner feels like punishing the loser and then the loser is let up to tuck tail and run.

So if we skip the wing beating for our human-goose interaction what we need to do is skip straight to the pinning. You can do this one of two ways, you can literally pin him to the ground or you can pick him up and hold him very firmly with an attitude of meaning business. Both accomplish the same thing. They immobilize the goose, with force, for an amount of time the goose has no control over. One thing to remember when doing this is the goose should be positioned to run from you when you set him down. So if you pin him on the ground, you should swing him around to face away from you.

And finally we have the victory lap stage. No matter how exhausting the fight you will not see an alpha gander let a good beating go unacknowledged. He will spread his wings, stand tall, run to his gaggle and honk his head off about it. Now, your neighbors may find you quite amusing (and possibly insane) if you were to run around your yard honking with your arms spread out like wings. But you CAN mimic the effect by saying something aloud. I like "THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT!" in the retreating goose's general direction for good measure. (note: I in no way guarantee this will exempt you from being seen as the neighborhood crazy. LOL!) But this is, of course, optional. Though a good touch, I must say.

So, to recap. In a goose on goose interaction you have.

The Discipline -- Can manifest in many ways.
The Challenge -- Usually snaked necks and spread wings
The Dance
The Neck Grab
The Chest Bumping
The Wing Beating
The Exhaustion
The Pinning
The Retreat (for the loser)
The Victory Lap (for the winner)

For human to goose interactions we can cut the list down.

The Discipline -- Can manifest in many ways. Any unacceptable behavior by a goose should be interpreted as this step.
The Challenge -- Snake your neck, spread your wings, posture over him, hiss for good measure.
The Chest Bumping -- Remember: it's a rare goose who will give up after just one. Give him 3 - 6 bumps to change his mind.
The Pinning -- Grab the neck, turn the goose away from you and pin him with force. Either on the ground or in your arms. Hold.
The Retreat (for the loser) -- This is why you turned him away from you. Set him up for success, give him a clear retreat path.
The Victory Lap (for the winner) -- Optional. I guess.

HTH!

 

[gryeyes]

Olive Hill, I want to thank you SO much for your instructions and explanation for each bit! I have a pair of young Toulouse geese, and they have been deferring to me quite well. I am dominant over my flock of chickens, including eleven roosters. Without any problem at all.

I've been wanting to hand feed my pair of Toulouse geese, though, and they wont eat out of my hand. Now I see I should be happy with them just wanting to be near me and occasionally accepting a skritch on the breast, not unlike grooming. I'll put their treats down and walk away, from now on. They've been happy enough with their goodies when I do that, already.

They are such interesting creatures, and so handsome. Even when they get the Zoomies and run somewhere flapping their wings. (They always fold their wings when they get close to me, if they were running to greet me, and gabble as if they are recounting the day's events.)

Again, I really appreciate what you told Atrayou, because it does relate to my situation as well.

Atrayou, thanks for posting the questions!

 

[Oregon Blues]

I don't strike my geese, but I am the flock boss, and I walk where I want, and they must get out of my way. They can't feed until I have left the feeder. They stop whatever they are doing if I give a harsh "Uh-uh".

When I got my geese, they were spoiled, so I carried an old broom with me. When they came at me, I pointed the broom at their chest and they couldn't figure out how to get around it, so they backed off. They are smart. They soon learned that they weren't allowed to come right up to me and that I was not going to drop the feed bucket and run if they threatened me.

I suspect that striking them might be seen as a challenge by a strong dominant gander. I have only physically punished my ganders one time, when one of them rushed at a visitor and disregarded my "uh-uh". I grabbed him by the neck, threw him roughly on the ground and held him down while I growled at him. He has never disobeyed me since. The poor thing had only been defending the goose, who was being caught and shoved in a cage, but no matter. The flock leader said "quit" and he didn't, so he got beat up.

Now he is working hard to be my best friend and is very polite and well mannered around me.

They are not dogs to be cuddle pets and even with a dog, even when dogs are spoiled, the human had better be the pack leader, or there will be problems with behavior.

 

[mominoz]

Wear the same shoes around him. I noticed my geese didn't like my feet and would zone in on them if I wore the "wrong color" Crocs outdoors to feed in. It does say the same thing in Storyes guide to geese , always wear the same shoes around the birds. I bet it has something to do with identification. Neither the ducks or geese like "other colors" at first, whether shoes or new birds. That is my observations anyway

 

[zzGypsy]

Olive hill has it right.

animals live in a social world and establish a social dominance order. we're part of that ranking, just not always where we think we are. their behavior towards us makes it quite clear where *they* think we stand. changing their opinion of that means communicating in a language they understand that you're higher status than they are. easier if you start out clear on the subject, but they can be convinced to accept your new higher rank if you are consistant, clear and determined.

for some folks it seems really harsh, but the alternative is harsher... having to re-home them, or have them destroyed because they can't be kept safely. much better to have them get a new picture about their place in the world of people.

 

[CelticOaksFarm]

I have a flag of red fabric on the end of a bamboo pole I use to wave and make myself bigger than our African gander. He has never nipped anyone here. He will honk super loud, lower his head and complain, but he will always submit if we charge him. Even the kids can challenge his wing spread and he will submit.

Might take some time, but it can be done, and you will be head goose!

 

[Olive Hill]

I'm glad you all got some use out of the post.

 

[Miss Lydia]

I will back my goose up and I will grab him by the neck to move him out of the way but I have never hit him, [i've felt like it] but I never have, I really don't think they understand hitting.