How To Train Your Dog Not To Kill Chickens

[centrarchid]

I took a longer route with respect to interactions between chickens and dogs. I expect protection and use hunting dogs where their territorial nature is promoted and their prey drive with respect to chickens is subdued. The take anywhere from 18 months to 2 years to get up to speed since what is desired is not innate, rather reliant upon their abilities to learn from me, chickens and even predators. Usually more than one bird is lost in process but in the end dogs prevent a lot more losses than they cause. The dogs can detect threats directly just like dogs used for protecting sheep and goats but my dogs also read the chickens communications effectively using the flocks as a radar for detecting bad guys even when down wind and out of sight which is easy to realize on my place. Once dogs are on the job I can sleep easier at night even with birds roosting on ground in a pasture. I live in an area without leash laws so fencing helps with free-ranging dogs but fencing does not stop most wild predators except under very specific conditions that do not protect my free-ranging birds. Just before starting this post my dogs ran off two pit bulls which is not as good as it sounds. We know those dogs and I have already invested effort in one of those dogs to keep from chasing by birds. This was done in part to develop good relationship with neighbor owning dog. Those same dogs if not causing me problems inadvertently help protect my birds as well because they are hostile to dogs and even coyotes coming from farther away. We do very well against other predators in part because my dogs do not ignore the chickens except when close proximity to them.

 

[srpchickens]

Dog training has nothing to do with shame.

Dog training starts the day you bring a pup home.

The dog learns the sit, down, leave it, come and 'at ease' commands, all day every day for the first few weeks.

You place the dog's meal before it, and command a 'sit' and gently push it's butt to the floor.

when the dog moves, you raise the food bowl. It does not eat until you say 'at ease'

After it figures out how to sit and stay sitting until told otherwise...you work on down. And then you place the bowl across the room, and practice, sit, down and come.

Then you put something desirable on the ground and say leave it, and come. and enforce it with a lead if need be.

I have hunting dogs...bird dogs. Taught to find, point, flush, and retrieve birds. And they walk right by my chickens because the day I put a chick on the floor I said leave it.

The trick to dog training is not abuse (beating it), not shame, not stuffing it in a kennel, or tying it up. It is simply laying down the ground rules, and being consistent and firm.

Once you allow a dog to break a command, it begins training you.

Once a dog starts training you....you have already lost the battle.

 

[bemba]

My new Husky x pup is doing very well with a ll the fowl so far.... She has good role models to follow with my other dogs

 

[chickens r life]

If I tied a dead chicken to my dog he would eat the instant I turn my back.. Lol

 

[Mini Meat]

I had an adult Aussie that when on a killing spree...15 chickens over a three day period. Everyone told me "once a chicken killer, always a chicken killer." I took a live chicken, a rolled up news paper and cornered the dog on the porch. I held the chicken in front of the dog and when she showed interest in it..WHAP! MY CHICKEN!!! I continued this until I could walk around the dog with the chicken in her face and she would not even look at the chicken. She completely averted her eyes. Harsh? Yes, but it was life or death... I intend to have chickens and frankly, there are other dogs that need good homes.

I was explaining to the dog that these chickens belong to me and are not to even be eyeballed by her.

Good news, she got the message and lived a long, contented life among 30 free range "invisible" chickens.

 

[Skipton Farm]

I did this with my adolescent maremma and he ate the chicken

 

[TalkALittle]

Dogs learn by experiencing consequences. Your dog has learned that unpleasant things happen when he chases baby chicks when you're around. He's learned those consequences don't occur when no one is around. He's learned to associate the consequences with you. You want him to associate the consequences with the chickens. This is the exact situation where a remote electronic collar would work best. Take yourself out of the picture. Watch from a window and apply a correction for arousal and predatory behavior towards the chicks.

I do suggest that you have him wear the collar (without the battery in) for a while so that he doesn't associate the correction with the collar. It's like when you put on a watch for the first time. You are very aware that the watch is on. If you got a zap to your wrist, you'd likely associate it with the new watch. But if you wear that watch every day for a week you begin to not even feel it on your wrist. If you reached for something and got a zap you'd be much more likely to associate it with the thing you reached for rather than the watch. Same thing with the collar. Dogs can become "equipment wise" unless some simple steps are taken to prevent it.

 

[tandykins]

I have two Mountain Feist, bred to hunt just about anything. They have been paying way too much attention to my coop, now that I moved it inside their fenced domain. They bark and go crazy anytime the chickens are in an uproar about something, and they have made my chickens really skittish so that I can't get them to cozy up to me when I bring treats. Yesterday, I had the coop door closed but not latched and one of the hens got out and was promptly killed by the dogs. My yoga instructor told me an old country solution to this problem worked with her dog. So, today when Larri started barking and being aggressive towards the chickens, I went and got that dead chicken and wired its feet together. Then, using a carabiner, I hooked the wire to his collar. I am going to make him drag it around all day and then let him loose tonight. As you can see in this photo, he was instantly shamed and he has hardly moved since then. This is a wonderful (although gross) punishment because I didn't yell, hit, or scold. I'll letcha know how his behavior changes after this experiment!

I just want to address a couple of things here. Firstly, I don't doubt that this works. Lots of things that are not a good idea work. I also want to add that I'm approaching this as someone studying behavioural science with an emphasis on animal behaviour.

Just because you are not yelling at or hitting your dog does not mean that you are not behaving in an abusive manner toward it. Making a dog carry around a corpse all day is psychological abuse - and yes, dogs are as affected as people by damage to their mental health.

Secondly, you're not making your dog ashamed of anything. That's anthropomorphization of the dog. You're assigning human emotions to a dog where there are none. That's not shame. That's fear. You're making the dog afraid of chickens because it can't escape one.

It might work if you have a dog who is attacking chickens purely out of predatory drive. On the other hand, if you have a highly strung dog who tends to lash out when fearful - you may be making a problem exponentially worse.

Just because a training method is effective does not mean that it is a good idea.

Backhanding your kid may well be effective in keeping them out of the cookie jar - but the abuse causes more harm than the problem it fixed. That may well not apply to dogs - but I think that unless you're -sure- of the long term effects on your animal as a result of it (and you'd really need an animal behaviouralist to say), I think it's unethical to do.

If something would be abusive when done to a human, it's generally a good sign that it's not okay to do to an animal. We are not that different in what harms our minds over the long term.

 

[kyexotics]

Why not just run a hot wire?

That's next if anything...It's to the point now, when he does get out, he only stays away for a few minutes chasing squirrels that have been teasing him all day then he comes back home...It's very rare, like last night LOLOL I let him off chain to run in fenced area(over an acre) with me in there and left the gate open to which he saw one of the pesky squirrels and gave chase LOL...He didn't even have to jump this time...He disappeared into woods for 5 minutes, I went inside, looked out in a bit and there he was back in fenced area, waiting to be put back on chain....So, I may or may not do anything else...And honestly, when he hones in on something, I can't stop him and I don't believe a hot wire will either(the collar didn't work, we tried that)...it's the reason he's on chain, once he wants something, always in protection of us or flock, I can't stop him...He's too big and I'm too 'crippled'...His presence has done the job as we haven't lost a bird since we got him when we were losing almost one a day...

I try to let him off chain as many times as possible each day to keep him around the ducks and chickens which he is fine with, he knows who lives there...We did have a couple of babies get loose and his size and 'rough' love killed them...He didn't bite or chew on them, he tried to shoo them back towards mommy freaking out by her fence and his nose was enough to fatally injure them...Overall his value to our flock and the amount of grief he's saved us is immeasurable, we love him and treat him like a king!...We have 4 house dogs that no longer get to fight over leftovers, they all go to Sarge, my buddy!




He dug out a mole he smelled! Parts of yard look like aftermath of carpet bombing due to his sniffer! LOL

 

[James Blaine]

you do realize that dogs LOVE dead things? they go out of their way to roll in them, chew on them, and carry them home.
This type of training, at best, means a dog that is too scared of chickens to go towards them. At worst, it is completely useless. It does nothing to teach a dog HOW to behave around chickens or what, exactly, is expected of him.

There are a lot of different training methods, depending on what you want to accomplish (guard? ignore?) but they all require actual effort on the part of the owner. Quick fixes like this are useless in the majority of cases.

Also, be careful because your dog could easily hang himself if the bird was to get caught on something.

When an old cock fighter told Me this method, He said to leave it tied to the dogs neck untill it rots off. The dog is so sick of the smell of the chicken. No more killing. If the dog kills again then the dog has to be put down. I was told this by a cock fighter, one chickens is worth $100"s.