Can border collies live with silkies and silkie chicks?

[Mountain Man Jim]

Training suggestions PMed.

Jim

 

[naturalfeddogs]

The place I get my raw deer scraps from for the dogs have tons of free range chickens wandering everywhere, and a Border Collie loose right along with them. All goes just fine.

 

[FeelingStupid]

An earlier poster wrote :


“dogs don’t generalize very well”.

In my observations, this is not the case. In fact the challenge and responsibility that we have in bringing up and living with our dogs is to teach them not to generalize when we don’t want them to. “ I want you to herd the sheep - not everything that moves” (such as chickens); “ I want you to “sit” - with your furry posterior on the floor facing forward and “don’t move” verus sitting with your poterior on the floor in any possible position and “moving” across the floor. If the dog is sitting and moving he is still sitting – therefore generalizing that as long as he is in the sit position he can do whatever he wants. From puppy we bring them up to generalize about what is acceptable to chew on. “Don’t chew on my stuff – do chew on whatever is in your toy box”. And most of us encourage our dogs to generalize in other circumstances. “Go find a stick” means go find any stick. Not just the one I first taught you was acceptable to chew on. “Go around” in my case may be used for “go around” the outside of the arena; or “go around” the pool” or “go around” anything I am pointing at when I use that command. She gets it. Dogs have had to try and figure out when generalization is called for as humans are by and large imprecise in their vocabulary.

The reason that most “dog” people think that dogs don’t generalize well is that you can take a dog and teach him “sit” in the kitchen, then take him to the living room and tell him “sit” and he acts like he never heard the word before. I attribute this more to the dog not being sure when he is to generalize and when to be specific so he tunes us out until he gets more information. Once he has been taught “sit” in different contexts he easily generalizes that to all locations while being non-general in executing the behavior.

In the context of my pet border collie and chickens, I have a challenge. She was encouraged to chase pigeons and cattle egrets for fun. Now we have chickens she is being taught to specifically not chase the Silkies. Where generalization comes in is that she is not to chase them under any circumstances. My birds are usually very docile but once in awhile will burst into a short flight right in front of her face. That kicks in her prey drive which the birds don’t seem to notice. I stop her right away. But that is why she is never left alone with them or if so, only for short periods while I hide and observe.

Since mine are so docile and rarely burst into flight, I am now beginning to work with my border collie by gently tossing a chicken right in front of her to incite her prey drive so I can teach her to not react. The chickens don’t seem to mind it as they come right back. Then the dog and I go off to play with an acceptable toy. Will she ever be safe? Probably not. But gives me a hobby. LOL!

We have also been rethinking why she burst into the coop that had the chicks in it, at night. Until she was 8 months old she lived with a family who never fed her out of a bowl. She ate out of a "treat ball" only. Always. Never, never a bowl. This was one skinny dog when we got her. They had 4 young kids. To t his day she is hesitant to eat in front of us if it is anything more than a small treat fed by hand. My husband speculates that she tried to sneakily eat food - probably dropped by the kids - and got yelled at. So she may have an ingrained behavior of sneak eating. Which may explain why she attacked sleeping chicks at night when no one was around rather than attacking during the day. We will never know. But I probably should not get more chicks until I can set up an actual chain link dog kennel or something else that the chick's coop can be set up in and locked at night as this behavior will be hard to extinguish. She has not yet attacked the adult coop but is carefully monitored.

The Silkies (which we have had for 2 weeks now) have been termed "oddly endearing" by my husband. And they have me wrapped around their little claws. I get up extra early to let them out as they are very adamant that I do so and I dig up worms for them (from an area they can't get to) and try and interpret their every squawk as they look up at me and insist I must have something they want, or if I hear t hem making a ruckus in the yard. So far the chickens are winning for who is the most catered to around here. LOL!