FluffyButt789
Songster
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Hoping the rest of the Wyandotte do well for hatching!
As for Mindy... it must just be her nature...though as a puppy we did teach her to 'lay quiet' and 'be easy' even before we got birds when she was 2. Dillon (also an English Shepherd) is also very tolerant of them but gets up and moves when the crawl on him, though he ignores them laying against him when he is sunning himself.
Mindy, though, goes out of her way to be with the birds, she will stay outside watching them for hours, she gets in the coops for patrol and baby watching and if there is a bird in the house for medical care she sleeps as close as she can with it as if the keep an eye on it or prevent loneliness. Any loud cheeping is immediate cause for human notification or racing to find the source...
English shepherds are known for this 'tending' mentality, but she has an unusually high dose of it. ES dogs are also known as critter dogs, and she and Dillon are both unforgiving to anything they view as threats to their birds or cats... coons, possums, rats and even stray cats but cats have always been run off, not caught... yet. They don't go off property to hunt, unless I have them out and tell them 'ok' to investigate something.
What is cool is how well they seem to figure things out for themselves, and how deliberate they are in their activities and how well they switch modes. They can run into a group of birds to attack a possum and not hurt a feather on a bird in the process. Or take out a rat one minute then flop down and watch chicks the next. We have seen this first hand a number of times...I don't know what I am going to do after Mindy is gone, don't even want to think about that. But I can tell you that we will probably always have an ES as long as we have poultry or other farm animals. I just dont know if we will have another one as 'chick crazy' as she is.
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