I’m usually asked a few times each year if things other than Border Collies work for goose control. The most popular methods asked about are fencing, mylar tape, dog and coyote decoys.Years ago I also had a prospective client who would walk around her ponds with a foam crocodile hat on her head and a client who showed me how when he would shoot a flare from a flare gun over the heads of geese on the nearby river, they would not even flinch. You probably get my meaning with the last two examples but with the fencing, geese can fly most of the year, and with the dog, coyote or even swan decoys, geese can tell in a short amount of time that decoys are not real.Every year I see geese hanging out by these decoys at clients properties were someone wants them used. I usually say when asked if decoys will work, that they can be helpful when utilized with the real thing. The real thing would be if your lucky enough to have a fox or real live coyotes hunting where you might have a goose problem. And as for fences, they can be somewhat helpful depending on the property. A lakeside property with a short beech and impediments on either side can work well enough. But often enough, during the parts of the year geese will fly, the fences cannot be tall enough. Therefore we do not offer any of the above-mentioned products. We will install or maintain any of these products when a client chooses to use them.Other goose control companies do offer and may well suggest alternatives to utilizing Border Collies, but as you can tell, we concentrate on what works for our clients.
This is where we bring in that idea, attitude. Border Collies have It. Border Collies were bred originally to herd sheep, to work closely with their handlers and get a job done. That job was and is still today herding sheep, or other farm animals and poultry. Herding instinctually comes from the stalk of wild canids, fox, wolf, coyote.These wild candid predators start each hunt with a stalk.Herding with Border Collies or other herding dog breeds is stalking in a very pronounced way. Herding gets the sheep and also the geese to move. Herding is used in a more pronounced way on geese than sheep. I call it herd-chase when we work geese. And you can say the Border Collies instinct to herd brings an attitude to the environment were geese have settled in. Geese, of course, can settle to the extent that they take over properties and lose their pray instant enough that they will even attack humans. So a Border Collie brings its predator attitude but with a bred in “weak bite and no kill instinct”, according to Professor Raymond Coppinger in “How Dogs Work”. And that is how and why Border Collie goose control works.
Over the years in New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut we have found our method to be usually effective. It does not always work. But I can point to parks and golf courses, and schools and corporate facilities were there where once 100s of geese. At two of the plants, we have worked the geese would not even let employees into the buildings during nesting season. After a short time, our service changed that and rarely are geese seen in very high sensitive places at those plants.
I should say that we have four very good working Border Collies for goose control. All our Border Collies, Skye, Jim, Blade, and Tara, live and train and work on our homestead ( small farm). But we also have one mix breed. His name is Nash( see our “our dogs” page). Nash is a rehomed dog who desperately needed a new home and has grown into a valuable goose control dog, learning his craft from the Border Collies. He indeed has brought his own attitude to the pack-team. I can talk a while about why all dogs might not make good goose control dogs. But Border Collies and mix breed dogs like Nash bring that attitude to goose control to be effective and humane.
