Category: dog training

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.

I like to say that all our dogs, Border Collies or mix breed dogs we have lived and worked with, are dear and special to us. We currently have five dogs living with us on the Homestead.All these dogs go on goose control trips in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, most participate in sheepdog trials and herding demonstrations at local festivals. We have now had eight dogs pass on. All these dogs are unique, loved and valued.They all have or had essential roles in our lives and work.

I used to manage farm museum programs which utilized the historical and rare breed types of farm animals, and yes dogs, inside an educational context. These programs were on Open Air or Museum Villages, think, Sturbridge Village or Colonial Williamsburg.It was great fun! We cut and processed hay with horses and oxen. We milked cows by hand or used oldfashioned machinery and collected and packaged historical and heirloom vegetable and herb seed for sale. But the working farm dog project on the historic farms was one of the most popular. We herded sheep, cattle, and pigs with the Border Collies. Our Families first dog Chelsea a mix breed rehomed female had great fun keeping the gardens and livestock safe back in the 1990s. Over the years dogs named, Merck, Will, Faith, Rhos, Ben, Tarr all worked with me at the Museums and on our Family Homestead (small farm).

So what about this dog Skye? Of all our dogs she is the only one from a litter that we have raised ourselves. Her dad, Ben, and Mom, Rhos, both lived here, were owned by us. It was an oops breeding. Ben was a “racial,” so you get the picture.But as is often the case with those type “events,” we got beautiful pups.I picked Skye out of the litter for us to keep, finding good homes for the other pups. She seemed bold and self-assured. But as Skye grew, she became a wild thing. As a young dog, Skye continued to be hyper. She often would not listen when asked and would rush her work and frighten the sheep or poultry. Living and working with Skye was a real adventure in patience. Her first years called for constant reminders that I needed to keep looking at the long-term goal. It can take a while for a pup or young dog to grow into an excellent working dog and companion. Many farm dogs will mature in three years or so.For Skye, she was rushing about no matter what I tried even at age five. A hyper Border Collie can be a big problem on a farm. Most farm Border Collies are not like you think, they can be calm and happy when they have the work they love. But like some people who take longer to mature she sure took her time to grow up.
As the old view of the “precocious” human girl manifested in the young adult Skye, she was into everything. Skye was a busybody, always wanting to take over jobs that may not have been hers and would burst out the door of our house almost at every opportunity to see if a marauding squirrel was at the bird feeders or a chicken had escaped from the poultry run.She is still very much like that at age seven and a half! But what has changed is, like me, Skye is a step or two slower. And there is a significant change in Skye. She has put the hyper worrisome spirit into an asset.She now has an eagerness which is almost always driven to do good work, to take care of the life on the Homestead and get the job done on goose control trips. Skye has become the mother dog, mama dog, of our pack-family, as Temple Grandin calls it. She is often concerned with keeping the pup, Tara out of trouble and always watchful that things with our sheep and poultry and on goose control trips are the way they should be. Wisdom and passion in dogs might not be scientific enough qualities to attach to dogs. But at this point, with Skye, it’s hard not to see her in those terms.

A few years ago I read a post by one of the top working Border Collie People here in the North East, Carol Campion.In the post, she talked about a “three species relationship.” Carol Campion was trying to get her readers to think about how working with Border Collies, or any herding or stock dog, and the sheep make up a three species relationship.

Border Collies were initially bred to “work” sheep in Great Briton and Ireland. However, as we do here on our homestead, they can “work,” herd, poultry, and other farm stock as well. The implication is that You, the being in charge of the situation, supposedly, should well understand your dog, and not forget that You need to understand the sheep. Of course, people should “get” themselves! Without a handler thinking about and even contemplating his or her actions and thoughts when working with a dog and livestock, failure will be close at hand. But, back to the dogs.There is a lot to know about dogs, to be in a “working/living” relationship. A handler should have a  deep understanding of the breed he or she is working with, Border Collie, Kelpie, Aussie, for examples. And that individual dogs are, well, individuals. And to make things more complicated, sheep are much more variable than most people think. If you farm sheep, you know there are many different breeds, all with a variety of instincts, behaviors. Instincts make “working” with sheep very interesting. Some breeds are “high strung,” some breeds are “Mello.” These variabilities mean that when You are trimming sheep hoves or giving them medication, what sheep you are working will be either easy to handle or complicated or very hard to restrain. It is important to know, understand sheep when herding them with a dog. Flight Distance in different breeds can be huge. If a handler and dog rush some breeds, the sheep will run so hard that they will end up on a hill somewhere completely out of bounds. Sometimes sheep “turn” and face a dog.This is a challenge to the dog. And Your Border Collie needs to have the skill to handle the situation properly.

When it comes to goose control with our Border Collies, and our one mix breed, it’s a bit less complicated than sheep. Canadian Geese are instinctually pretty much all the same. Or at least that is how it appears to me in the 16 years we have been chasing geese for clients in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Geese on a pond or a field react to being worked, herded/chased by our dogs pretty much the same way.However, there are variables. How the sheep and geese respond to herding or herd/chase, all depends on the experiences the sheep or geese have encountered. For instance, if someone tried to scare off geese in the past and it was not competent enough, I call this a “weak scare.” Geese will become resilient to being chased. Imagine that? If sheep have been handled/herded roughly, they will take off quickly, and you might have a mess on your hands. You may have sheep that are so hard to work with that they can never be adequately taken care of and take up too much of your time. We have neighbors who had sheep that were so out of control that they could never be penned and would go around unlocking gates to pig pastures, letting all the pigs run wild all over the nearby hills. If geese/sheep are not convinced from experience that someone who is herding or herding-chasing them “means business”, they will not move off and even can become resilient to future efforts.

However, there is an added layer of relationships during goose control client visits.It is not just handler and dogs and geese. We take two or three dogs on each client visit. We also have relationships with all the people and wild animals and birds in the environments we are working. We encounter people fishing, riding bikes, pushing baby carriages, driving cars, playing ball, picnicking.Working in public environments makes goose control complicated, and my sons and I assess the situation on any property we work before we start actively herding-chasing the geese.

All this comes down to what anyone on a farm or herding/chasing geese can do legally and ethically. And I am convinced that people who are “rough” on their dogs and animals, to use old-time words, are the “poorer” for it. What goes around comes around, cause and effect. The best teams of human handlers and dogs are those that have very good relationships. Both the human and dog have made an effort to study each other and the sheep if its farming or geese if its goose control. Working and living with our border collies, and yes that mixed breed Nash( see the “Our Border Collies” page) has been full of lessons hopefully many learned. Its been a joy doing this with my Family, I think we are a good team( see the “About Us” page.)

And above all, as another one of the top working Border Collie handlers, Chris Bowen said to us participants at what is called a learning sheepdog trial. ” Work on your relationship with your dog.” This response was about someone’s issue with their dog, but of course, that applies to all our relationships.