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!
Who ever it is he sure is handsome.
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!
I love it. I had a goose that we got at 3 that always nipped at the previous owner (there were only two ganders, both 3, raised together). One was shy and gentle, then there was Stanley.
When we first got Stanley, he would snake and his and we would snake and his right back. Then one night, he snaked out and bit my son's thigh. Ohhh, tenderness!! Of course, my son lost that round and I wasn't in the immediate vicinity to deal with it directly (I believe that, like dogs, they have to be caught being 'bad' in order to met out discipline. IMHO anyway.).
The next night though, he tried it on me. It was just when I was putting the flock to bed (chickens, ducks and the two ganders) and I think he'd started feeling protective about the sleeping quarters. Whatever, they were mine, not his. He came at me and I did the chest thing with my knee. Hard and firm enough to knock him back, but not hurt him. He came at me again. I did the same. The third time, I did it and when he came at me, I put my arm on the back of his neck and the other arm on his back and forced him to the ground. I held him there until he relaxed then let him go. Unfortunately, I didn't point him away from me where he had someplace to go...so he came back and we repeated this, the entire flock watching the whole time (those little honks were laughter, I swear!). This time, I'd learned my lesson and pointed him away after the pin down. And because my neighbours could neither see nor hear me, I DID do a bit of a victory 'whoop! I sure showed you, Mr. Goose! Don't you EVER try that again!!" as I flailed my arms madly about my head.
For some reason, we found that he would come and talk to us and liked to have us down on his level to talk to but, once down say, kneeling, he immediately became aggressive and tried to climb up, then the nipping started. This spring, I had to 'chest bump' and pin several times. He was good with me after that, but my kids are too young and it was too stressful always wondering where he was and where the kids were (we free run our flock), so Stanley had to be rehomed.
Fortunately, I read this thread before hatching out goslings in two weeks. We will strive to NOT imprint and actually I'm printing off the information for potential owners to read and acknowledge before they can take one home. Sold 'as is'...!
Thanks for the great info! Our second gander (the shy one) is really sweet, but now I know to NOT feed him from our hands. (He's in love with a duck, so maybe he's not right in the head anyway....)
Stanley watches over 'his' girl, Lady Bea (a crested duck)
and just to complete the story, I'm the one who has ended up with Stanley!Who ever it is he sure is handsome.
I see mine actually falling off the ramp going into the pool when trying to mate. it's hilarious.and just to complete the story, I'm the one who has ended up with Stanley!What an excellent article by Olive thank you SO much!
Stanley has been nipping at my husband and tried it once with me; I have gently 'chest bumped' him with my boot and we have both been pinning him down but never did the victory dance! I will rectify that tomorrow if I need to! I do like the fact that Stanley is so sociable, I think he just needs to occasionally be put in his place and that's fine with me. He sure does make the turkeys jump though! He & Gertie (a Toulouse goose) are still working out what to do when it comes to mating - they sure seem to take a lot of feathers out of each other!
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Big G is so clumsy!! He falls over if he does "the job" then honks at the sky for a minute! I am so afraid he will hurt the girls, geez he bites their neck so hardI have 1 egg that's a definite to hatch 4-3, i can see the gosling breathing and moving when I candle. Here's my first baby "Paddy" born on St Patrick's day
He (?) is HUGE already, will weigh him tomorrow. He has a real nibble issue already, so we are working on that. Loves neck rubs and trills to mefalls asleep. What a little doll! It hit 60 degrees so I took him out wrapped in a towel, he met his Dad. G was very respectful and quiet, almost submissive.. it was a very weird meeting. G always greets me with a loud GEEE GEEE. and once Paddy heard that, he peeped. The girls stopped dead and G stood very still. G and the girls almost seemed to be afraid! Its warm again tomorrow, so I will try a new intro. I am so worried they may hurt him not knowing he is theirs.
How precious, and Congrats.. let them meet through the fence they could accidently step on him and injure. All the best on your next ones hatching.Big G is so clumsy!! He falls over if he does "the job" then honks at the sky for a minute! I am so afraid he will hurt the girls, geez he bites their neck so hardI have 1 egg that's a definite to hatch 4-3, i can see the gosling breathing and moving when I candle. Here's my first baby "Paddy" born on St Patrick's day
He (?) is HUGE already, will weigh him tomorrow. He has a real nibble issue already, so we are working on that. Loves neck rubs and trills to mefalls asleep. What a little doll! It hit 60 degrees so I took him out wrapped in a towel, he met his Dad. G was very respectful and quiet, almost submissive.. it was a very weird meeting. G always greets me with a loud GEEE GEEE. and once Paddy heard that, he peeped. The girls stopped dead and G stood very still. G and the girls almost seemed to be afraid! Its warm again tomorrow, so I will try a new intro. I am so worried they may hurt him not knowing he is theirs.
