Lucky Penny
Mar 18th, 2008 by Laura
Confession time. We have a bird crazy puppy problem around here. We’ve never trusted Jake around the hens, as he’s a bit too interested in them, if you know what I mean. Now that we don’t have them in a run or him inside a fence, it’s been a bit of a balancing act making sure they’re getting outside time, but Jake isn’t chasing them.
Tonight when Mike got home only 3 hens went into the hen shack. Penny was AWOL somewhere out in the pasture. But he closed the door anyway since the dogs were loose.I asked him to leave the hen door open so that she could put herself back in, but he forgot to go back out and open it up.
When I got home an hour later he was mowing the front lawn and I went out to the shack to close the girls in assuming she was now inside - and I let the dogs go with me. Turns out since Mike hadn’t reopened the door she was just hanging out by the run.
She’s in serious molt and so has been a bit skittish the last week or so. She took one look at Jake and took off running for the tractor shed. Jake took off right after her. While he’s pretty well trained, he’s still a puppy at heart and a running flapping chicken was way too much to resist even with me yelling at him to stop and come.
He chased her all the way across our yard, through the neighbor’s yard and cornered her on the patio. Luckily there’s some furniture and such stored under the neighbor’s eves for winter and she was able to scramble under something until we could grab him and Mike could yard him off the barn.
I scooped her and took her back to the shack trying to calm her down. Seems that Jake never got a hold of her, even though I thought he had at one point. He just snatched a couple of feathers off her butt leaving a couple of small blood spots. She was definitely freaked out, and since she’s molty ugly right now it was hard to see right away that she was fine, but she is.
She’s quite the Lucky Penny. And Jake’s just lucky I didn’t kick his ass, well any more than I did that is. I cannot wait until the dog fence is up and the girls are safely out of reach of the bird crazy puppy. Until then no puppy loose unless we know the hens are all in the shack.
Hopefully as he gets closer to two years old he’ll start to chill out and be as uninterested in the hens as Sam is. Of course, that might be wishful thinking since not 20 minutes after chasing Penny he was eating cat poop and then trying to lick my face…
Wow, that was one lucky chicken!
I’ve been wanting to get some chickens for quite some time , but the fear of something like that happening puts me off. My 10 year old Great Dane still runs after birds and rabbits like he used to do when he was a pup, so I’m a bit scared he would find the chickens toooo interesting!.
Ok, I’m going to preface this comment with a disclaimer: this will not work for all dogs. I know it will not work for all dogs. I am not trying to claim it will work for all dogs. I’m just trying to offer an idea for those who want to mix chickens with dogs.
You’re trying to teach your dog to be calm around the chickens, so you want to control the interactions, keep it so your dog can only be calm, and then reward your dog.
Start by giving your dog a good bit of exercise and attention. Then put him on a leash and bring him within sight of the chickens–about to the point where you expect him to strain at the leash, quiver, go on alert, show interest . . . whatever. Then make your dog lie down. Stay nearby, have your dog stay down for a minute or two, then give them some praise and walk them away. Repeat this daily (ad nauseum?) increasing the length of time the dog stays down, decreasing the distance to the chickens. The idea is that you teach the dog to stay calm (lying down is what dogs do when they’re calm) when they’re around the chickens.
Now, again, I know this won’t work for all dogs. We did this with our dog, who was not a puppy and is very trainable. It worked like a charm with her–after a week, she could be off-leash around the chickens and didn’t ever chase them again. But I know some dogs are still puppies, have more of a prey drive, etc. But I really encourage anyone with dogs and chicks to treat this as something you can train your dog to deal with and not something you have to put up with.
I really enjoy your blog–thanks for writing!