You do have a point. What I was trying to say was, that with training a person should be able to trust their dog with the chickens. That dog never killed a chicken because he was trained from the first day we got him. We had dogs before that, that I ignorantly figured would just "get along" with the chickens because they all live here together. One of them wiped out my whole flock in an hour while we were gone. He was a pup, and so very proud of himself for retrieving all those birds - he left them all on the doorstep for us to find when we got home. I had another one that after we built an outside run for them would run and run and run around outside the pen until one would panic, fly out, and he'd catch it. Why didn't I put any training time on them? I had 3 small boys at the time, and I thought (hoped) that the dogs would figure it out on their own. Didn't work. With the trained dogs, I could relax. Working on training another one now. The key is training. Real, time-consuming, consistent training. If you don't have the time to do that, you're doing the right thing for your chickens by keeping them separated. I'm sorry you're not able to follow your dream of free ranging.
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