Many people who have poultry will eventually bring home an adorable new puppy. Puppies entertain us with their cute and playful antics, steal our hearts and become treasured members of our families. But as a puppy grows, those playful behaviors can transition to include chasing and killing our poultry unless we intervene.
Dogs are natural predators and perceive poultry as prey, but most puppies can be taught to control or redirect their prey drives. In the photo below, Echo expresses the characteristic physical intensity of an adolescent puppy demonstrating the "chase" part of prey drive.
Thankfully she was not chasing after a chicken but her toy, an empty plastic sports drink bottle. A puppy chasing after a ball or toy instead of our birds is an example of redirecting its prey drive in an acceptable way.
When they were puppies, my dogs adopted empty plastic bottles as their toy of choice. They loved tossing the bottle up in the air and batting it around on the ground. I soon realized they had inadvertently discovered an ideal toy, because the hollow rattling of an empty plastic bottle sounds nothing like a chicken when compared to typical squeaky toys. For this reason I highly recommend an empty plastic bottle toy to anyone who is teaching their puppy to be trustworthy around poultry. To prevent any chance of a choking hazard, remove the bottle cap first. My puppies had a habit of claiming their newest toy before I was quite done drinking the fluid. After I was finished, I always removed the cap.
Puppies should be monitored during flock interactions until they cease all predatory actions toward your birds. This includes whether your puppy is leashed or not, and whether you are visibly present to supervise or watching unseen from a hidden vantage point. This often means that puppies should be supervised until they exit their adolescence stage. Predatory behaviors include an intense fixed stare, stalking, chasing, pouncing, capturing, injuring or killing your poultry and eating the carcass. Think of predatory behaviors as a progression of building blocks or stepping stones. Sometimes people think that seeing their young puppy attempt to play with or chase their poultry is harmless. But as the puppy grows, such unchecked behaviors can progress to capturing and killing. That is why it is paramount to correct predatory behaviors at the earliest stages. Two keys to teaching your puppy to be trustworthy are consistency and repetition.
CONSISTENCY means setting clear rules that your puppy understands, then rewarding with abundant praise when it displays appropriate behaviors. Consistency also means correcting undesirable behaviors every time they occur. If on any given day you feel distracted, fatigued, stressed or for any reason not in a good frame of mind to work with your puppy, it is far better to save lessons for another day than to become impatient or allow inappropriate behaviors to occur. Strive to always make training sessions enjoyable for your puppy, your flock and yourself.
REPETITION means observing your puppy exhibit appropriate behaviors while around your poultry reliably and over a satisfactory period of time until you feel confident that it is trustworthy.
In order to teach your puppy the lessons you want it to learn, it is helpful to understand how a puppy learns as it grows. The learning stages (Reisen, 2021) listed below are grouped by age, but they are only general guidelines. Training progress will vary greatly according to your puppy's temperament and your training skills, as well as the amount of time you devote to training.
STAGES OF PUPPY LEARNING
Neonatal Period: 0-4 weeks
This period takes place before most people meet their new puppy, so I won't discuss it here.
Socialization Period: 4-12 weeks
A puppy spends part of this period with its mother and siblings, then usually spends the later weeks in its new home. A puppy's mind is like a sponge during this period, and it is the most important time to introduce puppies to new people, animals, experiences and environments. Expose your puppy to your flock as often as possible while under your supervision, but do not allow it to play with or chase your birds. Praise your puppy every time it demonstrates desired behaviors such as paying attention to you and ignoring your flock. If your puppy shows excessive interest in your birds, distract by drawing its attention to you. When your puppy responds, immediately offer ample praise. If your puppy resumes excessive interest toward your flock, move farther away from your poultry or remove the puppy for another training session at a future time. Harsh corrections are not helpful at this stage and may cause your puppy to fear but not trust and respect you.
A puppy's attention span during the socialization period is generally limited to about fifteen minutes, but as your puppy ages through the period you can slowly increase training time. Aim to always end training before your puppy loses attention and focus. Puppies grow and learn quickly, and even at the socialization stage a puppy's habits are beginning to form. Always remember that it is much harder to break a habit than to prevent it in the first place. During this period, teach your puppy to walk on a leash as well as simple obedience commands such as Sit, Come and Leave it.
Juvenile Period: 3-6 months
During this stage puppies begin to feel more confident and assertive, and puppies with more dominant temperaments may even begin to challenge your authority. It is critical for your puppy to respect you before it will respect your lessons. If your puppy is aggressive or resistant to your authority, the juvenile period is a good time to enroll in a basic obedience class. The class will help you establish your role as your puppy's leader, and you will also learn about training aids such as how to properly use a clicker and a training collar. During the juvenile stage, teach your puppy more advanced obedience commands such as Down and Stay. I also teach the commands Off to keep puppies from jumping on me or other objects, Get back when I want a puppy to give me space, Ok to signify a lesson is over, and Easy to enforce calm behavior around my chickens. Always teach new commands on leash and with no other distractions. When your puppy has learned to reliably respond to your commands without distractions, test your puppy by moving into the proximity of your poultry. Your juvenile puppy should be leashed while mingling with your poultry in order to immediately correct any predatory behaviors. Always make sure your puppy is well-fed and has had plenty of exercise before interacting with your flock. Many times even a very obedient puppy can't focus on its lessons until it has the chance to release pent-up energy.
During the juvenile stage it is important to correct your puppy for unwanted behaviors. But when you do so, always remember to give ample praise when your puppy obeys your command. If your puppy chases after a bird and you interrupt the behavior by shouting "Leave it!" and calling your puppy to "Come" to you, never punish your puppy after it has obeyed your recall command. Your puppy will likely not understand that you are unhappy it chased a bird. Instead it will perceive it is being reprimanded for coming when called. This will create confusion, distrust and fear, and your puppy may decide it's pointless to obey you. During the juvenile period, never leave your puppy unsupervised with your flock.
Adolescence Period: 6-24 months
These are the months when puppies become the equivalent of human teenagers. They reach sexual maturity, and hormones begin to surge if they are not yet spayed or neutered. Just like human teenagers, some adolescent puppies seem to forget all we thought they had learned. Your adolescent puppy hasn't forgotten its lessons but is testing its boundaries. Adolescence is often the period when BYC members make threads pleading for advice, explaining that their puppy had been so well-behaved but is now killing their poultry. Incidently, adolescence is also the period when many puppies are surrendered to shelters. Continue with consistent training while monitoring your adolescent puppy, and have faith and stay the course. There will be light near the end of your puppy's adolescence as it enters into adulthood.
When a puppy is no longer showing any predatory behaviors while I am holding their leash, I take the next step of tying the leash to a tree or pole while I observe the puppy's behaviors from several feet away. I do this many times in different locations before I trust them off leash around the chickens.
Rango tied to a pole and ignoring chickens.
Echo tied to a pole and ignoring chickens.
My puppies live outside in a 10'x10'x6' chain-link kennel with near constant exposure to chickens. Hens frequently stick their heads through the chain-link into the puppy pen, and if a puppy were to ever show any predatory aggression towards the hens, I would cover the bottom three feet of the chain-link with half-inch hardware cloth, same as one would do to protect against wildlife predators.
Even though Echo had exposure to chickens her entire puppyhood, when she was about eleven months old she began to express prey drive in the form of trying to make the chickens run by pouncing at them as they walked by her kennel. She had a playful facial expression when she did this, but if I had not happened to look out my window to see and correct that behavior, her prey drive might have escalated to harming a hen.
And there's more. One evening while adolescent Echo was out of her pen and unleashed, I became distracted for several minutes with a farm chore. When I regained focus, Echo was nowhere in sight. I headed through the woods and emerged to see Echo happily chasing a rooster as it ran around the yard. When I yelled "ECHO, LEAVE IT!", she immediately ceased the chase, and when I commanded her to "Come Here", she also did so immediately. I wasn't happy (understatement), but also knew the situation was my fault for not restraining her while I was distracted. Luckily for the rooster, Echo's prey drive ended at chasing before potentially escalating further. Since Echo ceased the chase as soon as I shouted her name and also came when I called, I praised and petted her for responding and put the incident behind us.
After your puppy has demonstrated consistent and repetitive good behaviors for many months while unleashed in your presence, there is a final training phase to be sure your puppy is truly trustworthy. Hide someplace (inside your home while looking out a window, behind a building, etc.) and observe your puppy's behaviors when it thinks you're not watching. Be ready to immediately reappear with a strong verbal correction if your puppy's behavior changes in your absence, i.e. if you observe any predatory behaviors toward your flock.
By the time Rango turned nine months old, I had spent nearly every day for the past seven months monitoring and supervising him both on and off leash, and he had not exhibited any interest toward chickens since early in his juvenile stage.
But to thoroughly test him, I went inside my house and watched out a window to see what he would do in my absence. Rango was lying under a shade tree near the window with his plastic bottle toy between his paws. A hen was taking a dust bath nearby. For about ten minutes all was well. But eventually Rango glanced back towards the hen, his eyes lit up with mischief, and he playfully pounced toward the hen. I instantly ran back outside shouting a loud, firm "NO! LEAVE IT!" The hen simultaneously got up from her dust hole and ran to her coop squawking that the dog had ruined her dust bath. After that episode I continued to monitor and test Rango over the ensuing months, and he never again showed any predatory behaviors toward the chickens. By the time he was fourteen months old, I felt certain that he would never harm them, and five years later, he never has.
In a perfect world, we begin working with our puppy at the socialization stage and progress through the periods in their natural order. But life isn't always smooth, and personal and work-related circumstances can interfere with training time. Months of weather-related issues delayed Echo's training progress during her juvenile and early adolescence periods.
In the first two videos below, adolescent Echo had already learned to reliably come when called along with other commands. Ideally I would have also solidified her response to my Easy command during her juvenile stage. In the first video I was instructing her to be calm and go "easy" as we slowly approached a group of chickens. Note that I was not only telling Echo to go easy, but my slow pace was also showing her what "Easy" means. Dogs learn much faster through observing our body language than they do by our spoken words. This was not Echo's first "Easy" lesson while either on or off leash, but I had made a mistake in judgement. I had just released her from her puppy pen on a cold February morning, and that combined with her youthful exuberance meant that she could barely contain her energy. Frankly this caught me off guard, and imagine how unfair it would have been to her if the video depicted her very first Easy lesson. I am including this video to emphasize why it's so important to allow a puppy to release excess energy before it can properly focus, and also to show how Echo controlled her impulse to follow her desires and instead obeyed my recall command. The video ends with my Ok release command which lets Echo know she is free to go.
I recorded this second video on the very same day as the first. But later that same day, after hours spent running free with goats, Echo was now able to fully focus on her lesson. Note at the eleven second mark how she slightly veers away from a group of chickens as she approaches. And when a hen squawks and flies away directly in her path, Echo not only ignores the hen's commotion but slows her pace even more. "Easy" essentially means "Don't startle the chickens", and Echo was gaining full understanding and impulse control.
Finally, I made the third video this past December 2022 after deciding to write this article. Look what Echo has learned! She now fully understands to control her actions so she won't startle the chickens. Along with her slow and careful approach, at the eighteen-second mark Echo glances over at the chickens to make sure they have remained calm. Echo is now a young adult dog. She still has boundless energy but is completely trustworthy around the chickens, and her presence keeps them safe from predators.
Teaching your puppy to be trustworthy around your poultry requires patience and time as your puppy grows and learns. But for those who enjoy spending time outdoors with their puppy and their flock, training is enjoyable, and time passes fast. There is more to know about teaching your puppy to be trustworthy than one article can cover. The personality and temperament of each puppy is unique, and different breeds have different traits too. Learn all you can through written media, videos and other avenues, then adapt the information you learn to train your own puppy. Be aware that no matter how much time and effort is invested in training, some puppies have prey drives too high to ever be trusted around poultry. Sight hounds and terriers have notoriously high prey drives culminating in killing their prey, but individuals of these groups can still be successfully trained. Even puppies representing toy breeds are capable of killing poultry as they grow to adolescence. If your puppy has already killed poultry, all hope is not lost. As long as you are dedicated and patient, even a puppy that has killed can usually be retrained to exhibit proper behaviors around a flock.
Here is a thread where post #3 provides an excellent step-by-step tutorial on how to teach the Leave It command.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/puppy-killing-ducklings.1486387/
Here are other threads with advice on retraining puppies that have killed poultry.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/how-to-train-young-dog-not-to-eat-chickens.1555469/
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/puppy-killing-birds.1545353/#post-26088969
Many variables result in there being multiple paths and timelines to achieve the goal of teaching a puppy to be trustworthy around poultry. Have faith, patience and confidence in your puppy as well as yourself. As long as your puppy has a suitable temperament and your lessons are thorough and consistent, your puppy will enter into adulthood to become the trustworthy poultry friend you hope for him or her to be.
References
Reisen, Jan. March 30, 2021. American Kennel Club. A Puppy Growth Timeline: Transitions in Puppyhood
Dogs are natural predators and perceive poultry as prey, but most puppies can be taught to control or redirect their prey drives. In the photo below, Echo expresses the characteristic physical intensity of an adolescent puppy demonstrating the "chase" part of prey drive.
Thankfully she was not chasing after a chicken but her toy, an empty plastic sports drink bottle. A puppy chasing after a ball or toy instead of our birds is an example of redirecting its prey drive in an acceptable way.
When they were puppies, my dogs adopted empty plastic bottles as their toy of choice. They loved tossing the bottle up in the air and batting it around on the ground. I soon realized they had inadvertently discovered an ideal toy, because the hollow rattling of an empty plastic bottle sounds nothing like a chicken when compared to typical squeaky toys. For this reason I highly recommend an empty plastic bottle toy to anyone who is teaching their puppy to be trustworthy around poultry. To prevent any chance of a choking hazard, remove the bottle cap first. My puppies had a habit of claiming their newest toy before I was quite done drinking the fluid. After I was finished, I always removed the cap.
Puppies should be monitored during flock interactions until they cease all predatory actions toward your birds. This includes whether your puppy is leashed or not, and whether you are visibly present to supervise or watching unseen from a hidden vantage point. This often means that puppies should be supervised until they exit their adolescence stage. Predatory behaviors include an intense fixed stare, stalking, chasing, pouncing, capturing, injuring or killing your poultry and eating the carcass. Think of predatory behaviors as a progression of building blocks or stepping stones. Sometimes people think that seeing their young puppy attempt to play with or chase their poultry is harmless. But as the puppy grows, such unchecked behaviors can progress to capturing and killing. That is why it is paramount to correct predatory behaviors at the earliest stages. Two keys to teaching your puppy to be trustworthy are consistency and repetition.
CONSISTENCY means setting clear rules that your puppy understands, then rewarding with abundant praise when it displays appropriate behaviors. Consistency also means correcting undesirable behaviors every time they occur. If on any given day you feel distracted, fatigued, stressed or for any reason not in a good frame of mind to work with your puppy, it is far better to save lessons for another day than to become impatient or allow inappropriate behaviors to occur. Strive to always make training sessions enjoyable for your puppy, your flock and yourself.
REPETITION means observing your puppy exhibit appropriate behaviors while around your poultry reliably and over a satisfactory period of time until you feel confident that it is trustworthy.
In order to teach your puppy the lessons you want it to learn, it is helpful to understand how a puppy learns as it grows. The learning stages (Reisen, 2021) listed below are grouped by age, but they are only general guidelines. Training progress will vary greatly according to your puppy's temperament and your training skills, as well as the amount of time you devote to training.
STAGES OF PUPPY LEARNING
Neonatal Period: 0-4 weeks
This period takes place before most people meet their new puppy, so I won't discuss it here.
Socialization Period: 4-12 weeks
A puppy spends part of this period with its mother and siblings, then usually spends the later weeks in its new home. A puppy's mind is like a sponge during this period, and it is the most important time to introduce puppies to new people, animals, experiences and environments. Expose your puppy to your flock as often as possible while under your supervision, but do not allow it to play with or chase your birds. Praise your puppy every time it demonstrates desired behaviors such as paying attention to you and ignoring your flock. If your puppy shows excessive interest in your birds, distract by drawing its attention to you. When your puppy responds, immediately offer ample praise. If your puppy resumes excessive interest toward your flock, move farther away from your poultry or remove the puppy for another training session at a future time. Harsh corrections are not helpful at this stage and may cause your puppy to fear but not trust and respect you.
A puppy's attention span during the socialization period is generally limited to about fifteen minutes, but as your puppy ages through the period you can slowly increase training time. Aim to always end training before your puppy loses attention and focus. Puppies grow and learn quickly, and even at the socialization stage a puppy's habits are beginning to form. Always remember that it is much harder to break a habit than to prevent it in the first place. During this period, teach your puppy to walk on a leash as well as simple obedience commands such as Sit, Come and Leave it.
Juvenile Period: 3-6 months
During this stage puppies begin to feel more confident and assertive, and puppies with more dominant temperaments may even begin to challenge your authority. It is critical for your puppy to respect you before it will respect your lessons. If your puppy is aggressive or resistant to your authority, the juvenile period is a good time to enroll in a basic obedience class. The class will help you establish your role as your puppy's leader, and you will also learn about training aids such as how to properly use a clicker and a training collar. During the juvenile stage, teach your puppy more advanced obedience commands such as Down and Stay. I also teach the commands Off to keep puppies from jumping on me or other objects, Get back when I want a puppy to give me space, Ok to signify a lesson is over, and Easy to enforce calm behavior around my chickens. Always teach new commands on leash and with no other distractions. When your puppy has learned to reliably respond to your commands without distractions, test your puppy by moving into the proximity of your poultry. Your juvenile puppy should be leashed while mingling with your poultry in order to immediately correct any predatory behaviors. Always make sure your puppy is well-fed and has had plenty of exercise before interacting with your flock. Many times even a very obedient puppy can't focus on its lessons until it has the chance to release pent-up energy.
During the juvenile stage it is important to correct your puppy for unwanted behaviors. But when you do so, always remember to give ample praise when your puppy obeys your command. If your puppy chases after a bird and you interrupt the behavior by shouting "Leave it!" and calling your puppy to "Come" to you, never punish your puppy after it has obeyed your recall command. Your puppy will likely not understand that you are unhappy it chased a bird. Instead it will perceive it is being reprimanded for coming when called. This will create confusion, distrust and fear, and your puppy may decide it's pointless to obey you. During the juvenile period, never leave your puppy unsupervised with your flock.
Adolescence Period: 6-24 months
These are the months when puppies become the equivalent of human teenagers. They reach sexual maturity, and hormones begin to surge if they are not yet spayed or neutered. Just like human teenagers, some adolescent puppies seem to forget all we thought they had learned. Your adolescent puppy hasn't forgotten its lessons but is testing its boundaries. Adolescence is often the period when BYC members make threads pleading for advice, explaining that their puppy had been so well-behaved but is now killing their poultry. Incidently, adolescence is also the period when many puppies are surrendered to shelters. Continue with consistent training while monitoring your adolescent puppy, and have faith and stay the course. There will be light near the end of your puppy's adolescence as it enters into adulthood.
When a puppy is no longer showing any predatory behaviors while I am holding their leash, I take the next step of tying the leash to a tree or pole while I observe the puppy's behaviors from several feet away. I do this many times in different locations before I trust them off leash around the chickens.
Rango tied to a pole and ignoring chickens.
Echo tied to a pole and ignoring chickens.
My puppies live outside in a 10'x10'x6' chain-link kennel with near constant exposure to chickens. Hens frequently stick their heads through the chain-link into the puppy pen, and if a puppy were to ever show any predatory aggression towards the hens, I would cover the bottom three feet of the chain-link with half-inch hardware cloth, same as one would do to protect against wildlife predators.
Even though Echo had exposure to chickens her entire puppyhood, when she was about eleven months old she began to express prey drive in the form of trying to make the chickens run by pouncing at them as they walked by her kennel. She had a playful facial expression when she did this, but if I had not happened to look out my window to see and correct that behavior, her prey drive might have escalated to harming a hen.
And there's more. One evening while adolescent Echo was out of her pen and unleashed, I became distracted for several minutes with a farm chore. When I regained focus, Echo was nowhere in sight. I headed through the woods and emerged to see Echo happily chasing a rooster as it ran around the yard. When I yelled "ECHO, LEAVE IT!", she immediately ceased the chase, and when I commanded her to "Come Here", she also did so immediately. I wasn't happy (understatement), but also knew the situation was my fault for not restraining her while I was distracted. Luckily for the rooster, Echo's prey drive ended at chasing before potentially escalating further. Since Echo ceased the chase as soon as I shouted her name and also came when I called, I praised and petted her for responding and put the incident behind us.
After your puppy has demonstrated consistent and repetitive good behaviors for many months while unleashed in your presence, there is a final training phase to be sure your puppy is truly trustworthy. Hide someplace (inside your home while looking out a window, behind a building, etc.) and observe your puppy's behaviors when it thinks you're not watching. Be ready to immediately reappear with a strong verbal correction if your puppy's behavior changes in your absence, i.e. if you observe any predatory behaviors toward your flock.
By the time Rango turned nine months old, I had spent nearly every day for the past seven months monitoring and supervising him both on and off leash, and he had not exhibited any interest toward chickens since early in his juvenile stage.
But to thoroughly test him, I went inside my house and watched out a window to see what he would do in my absence. Rango was lying under a shade tree near the window with his plastic bottle toy between his paws. A hen was taking a dust bath nearby. For about ten minutes all was well. But eventually Rango glanced back towards the hen, his eyes lit up with mischief, and he playfully pounced toward the hen. I instantly ran back outside shouting a loud, firm "NO! LEAVE IT!" The hen simultaneously got up from her dust hole and ran to her coop squawking that the dog had ruined her dust bath. After that episode I continued to monitor and test Rango over the ensuing months, and he never again showed any predatory behaviors toward the chickens. By the time he was fourteen months old, I felt certain that he would never harm them, and five years later, he never has.
In a perfect world, we begin working with our puppy at the socialization stage and progress through the periods in their natural order. But life isn't always smooth, and personal and work-related circumstances can interfere with training time. Months of weather-related issues delayed Echo's training progress during her juvenile and early adolescence periods.
In the first two videos below, adolescent Echo had already learned to reliably come when called along with other commands. Ideally I would have also solidified her response to my Easy command during her juvenile stage. In the first video I was instructing her to be calm and go "easy" as we slowly approached a group of chickens. Note that I was not only telling Echo to go easy, but my slow pace was also showing her what "Easy" means. Dogs learn much faster through observing our body language than they do by our spoken words. This was not Echo's first "Easy" lesson while either on or off leash, but I had made a mistake in judgement. I had just released her from her puppy pen on a cold February morning, and that combined with her youthful exuberance meant that she could barely contain her energy. Frankly this caught me off guard, and imagine how unfair it would have been to her if the video depicted her very first Easy lesson. I am including this video to emphasize why it's so important to allow a puppy to release excess energy before it can properly focus, and also to show how Echo controlled her impulse to follow her desires and instead obeyed my recall command. The video ends with my Ok release command which lets Echo know she is free to go.
I recorded this second video on the very same day as the first. But later that same day, after hours spent running free with goats, Echo was now able to fully focus on her lesson. Note at the eleven second mark how she slightly veers away from a group of chickens as she approaches. And when a hen squawks and flies away directly in her path, Echo not only ignores the hen's commotion but slows her pace even more. "Easy" essentially means "Don't startle the chickens", and Echo was gaining full understanding and impulse control.
Finally, I made the third video this past December 2022 after deciding to write this article. Look what Echo has learned! She now fully understands to control her actions so she won't startle the chickens. Along with her slow and careful approach, at the eighteen-second mark Echo glances over at the chickens to make sure they have remained calm. Echo is now a young adult dog. She still has boundless energy but is completely trustworthy around the chickens, and her presence keeps them safe from predators.
Teaching your puppy to be trustworthy around your poultry requires patience and time as your puppy grows and learns. But for those who enjoy spending time outdoors with their puppy and their flock, training is enjoyable, and time passes fast. There is more to know about teaching your puppy to be trustworthy than one article can cover. The personality and temperament of each puppy is unique, and different breeds have different traits too. Learn all you can through written media, videos and other avenues, then adapt the information you learn to train your own puppy. Be aware that no matter how much time and effort is invested in training, some puppies have prey drives too high to ever be trusted around poultry. Sight hounds and terriers have notoriously high prey drives culminating in killing their prey, but individuals of these groups can still be successfully trained. Even puppies representing toy breeds are capable of killing poultry as they grow to adolescence. If your puppy has already killed poultry, all hope is not lost. As long as you are dedicated and patient, even a puppy that has killed can usually be retrained to exhibit proper behaviors around a flock.
Here is a thread where post #3 provides an excellent step-by-step tutorial on how to teach the Leave It command.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/puppy-killing-ducklings.1486387/
Here are other threads with advice on retraining puppies that have killed poultry.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/how-to-train-young-dog-not-to-eat-chickens.1555469/
https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/puppy-killing-birds.1545353/#post-26088969
Many variables result in there being multiple paths and timelines to achieve the goal of teaching a puppy to be trustworthy around poultry. Have faith, patience and confidence in your puppy as well as yourself. As long as your puppy has a suitable temperament and your lessons are thorough and consistent, your puppy will enter into adulthood to become the trustworthy poultry friend you hope for him or her to be.
References
Reisen, Jan. March 30, 2021. American Kennel Club. A Puppy Growth Timeline: Transitions in Puppyhood
