Puppy killled a chicken

[pets4life]

mine is good with my 2 geese because they are fearless so my dog is calm with them but chickens get so flighty and triggers prey drive

[MadLab]

My friends 2 3 month old GSD X puppies just tried to kill my rooster but i caught them in the act. I'm afraid the animal in me kicked in and i punished them while pulling them off him.

What would you do in that situation. Basically the dogs chased the bird around the garden and cornered him and were biting him hard as the rooster was squealing in pain. I picked them up by the necks and gave them a slap in the face. They let a small squeak out of them nothing as bad as my roosters cries.

I think they are all gonna be ok though.

[APBTLove]

Originally Posted by MadLab

My friends 2 3 month old GSD X puppies just tried to kill my rooster but i caught them in the act. I'm afraid the animal in me kicked in and i punished them while pulling them off him.

What would you do in that situation. Basically the dogs chased the bird around the garden and cornered him and were biting him hard as the rooster was squealing in pain. I picked them up by the necks and gave them a slap in the face. They let a small squeak out of them nothing as bad as my roosters cries.

I think they are all gonna be ok though.

How about don't allow pups loose with your prey animals? Hm?

If you're going to snatch up a puppy and smack it in the face for attacking a chicken, please don't tell me you have dogs. The time it would take you to get them away from the bird, pick them up one by one by their necks and hit them - they wouldn't even know WHY you were attacking them.

What would I do in that situation? I wouldn't HAVE that situation because I would be protecting my bird, not letting pups loose with them. But if an accident happened, I'd pick the PUPPIES up and put them somewhere secure because giving the bird medical attention. I would not beat them in the face for being dogs. These aren't even your puppies! Does your friend know what you did to their pups?

[MadLab]

Yea i told her straight away.

My dogs have been trained not to go for the chickens.

I will use force on dogs if there a danger to somebody or themselves. In this case i might have been wrong but that was my instinct. They hurt my rooster so i hurt them. It's a kind of natural law in my eyes.

I slapped them but i did not hurt them. It was a split second thing. I picked the 2 up at the same time put them down and gave the 2 of them a slap. You can say they didn't know why i hit them but i didn't see them continuing going after the rooster so i presume they got the message.

The bird was separated from the dogs but they managed to move a barrier into the shed where the rooster was. He bolted and they gave chase.

[Lauri & The Gang]

Originally Posted by MadLab

My friends 2 3 month old GSD X puppies just tried to kill my rooster but i caught them in the act. I'm afraid the animal in me kicked in and i punished them while pulling them off him.

What would you do in that situation. Basically the dogs chased the bird around the garden and cornered him and were biting him hard as the rooster was squealing in pain. I picked them up by the necks and gave them a slap in the face. They let a small squeak out of them nothing as bad as my roosters cries.

I think they are all gonna be ok though.

I would have done exactly what you did MINUS the face slap.

I would have grabbed them by the scruffs, gave them a quick shake and yelled NOOOO! at the top of my lungs.

Then I would have checked out the rooster and tried to find out how it got loose and fixed that.

[MadLab]

I heard the rooster screeching from inside the house so ran out in a bit of a panic, i guess. If i was any slower the bird would have been killed

I know the pups are doing what comes natural to them but i also acted from my instincts.

Now maybe the pups will think twice before trying to kill something they're not meant to.

[OffgridAlex]

I don't think the slap was necessary but if I caught Duke in the act of killing a chicken I would be sure to pull him off by the scruff and shout at him.

It was the timing that was the most idiotic thing in my MIL advise. To punish a dog after all the killing is over at the moment it is surrendering it's food to you would IMO be the most retarded move in the world. What would that have taught my dog?

[RowdyDogs]

Originally Posted by MadLab

My dogs have been trained not to go for the chickens.

If you know how to train dogs not to go after chickens, then if your friend is a regular visitor with her pups, do the same training with them. Until then, I would not leave them alone in the yard if there's even the slightest chance they can access the chickens. A barrier that can be moved by a 3-month-old puppy is not much of a barrier. That was a failure on your part.

I can understand your reaction from an emotional point of view, but I doubt it will have any effect on the puppies in the long term, at least when it comes to chasing chickens. The prey drive is incredibly strong and IME the only way to reliably overcome it is to consistently and calmly teach the dog self-control.

When the puppies chased the rooster, that was its own reward, whether they'd caught him or not--chasing is fun, after all. You got to them after they already caught him, so your correction had little or no (probably no) connection to the chase in their minds. To you, it seemed like a split second--but to the puppies, they caught a rooster, then you took it away, put them down, and then slapped them. If anything, they'll associate the slap with you setting them down, not with the rooster.

In the future, even if they did associate the slap with biting the rooster, you still can't rely on that. Once a dog gets into strong prey drive, they're not thinking about much else. That's why you need to train them to not chase or see your livestock as prey in the first place, not correct them for chasing and attacking.

Like I said, I understand where you're coming from. When my GSD first showed up, part of the reason I was determined not to keep him (LOL we see how that worked out) was because he attacked one of my goats and did some damage to the poor thing--though everyone was ultimately OK there too, after a vet visit and some stitches and antibiotics for the poor goat. I tackled Hector to get him to release the goat and smacked him twice after he'd let go--not hard enough to seriously hurt him or even get a yelp, but enough to scare him. It was IMO an understandable reaction (I loved that goat), but it was also an abusive action because my dog didn't understand why I was hitting him. I still regret doing that, even though I was just in a panic and wouldn't have done that in a more normal situation. So I really do know where you're coming from, but short of actively stopping an attack (if you'd had to hit the dog to get him to release the rooster, for example, and even then there are usually more effective ways), hitting a dog isn't really ever appropriate.

Also, regarding the feeding the dead chicken thing discussed earlier...yeah, after thinking about it further, it's kind of silly to think that letting a dog eat a cleaned chicken would encourage him to kill them in the future. Like I said, I grew up in a culture where killing one chicken was a death sentence for most dogs, so I was always erring extremely on the side of caution, but yeah...it's also a bit hypocritical since I let my dogs chew on horse hoof trimmings all the time and I don't think that will make them more prone to nipping at or chasing horses.

[MadLab]

Your right, i did act out of emotion and it was not a training choice. The pups would learn little or nothing from the encounter but would mistrust me for hitting them.

I trained my own dogs over a few weeks by being there and verbally telling them not to attack the chicken and feeding them rewards for not doing so.

I would always make sure the dogs were not out in the yard with the chicken on it's own until they were used to it.

These pups were let out with out my knowledge and they pried open the barrier to the rooster.

Thanks for your explanation. It makes a lot of sense.

[RowdyDogs]

No problem, glad it helped. Sounds like you trained your dogs pretty much like I trained mine. The nice thing about herding breeds, GSDs included, is that even with a strong prey drive they tend to be pretty amenable to the idea that certain types of stock are off-limits as prey.

Everyone makes mistakes like not realizing the pups were out, too. I certainly have. I'm glad it didn't result in any fatal injury to the rooster, and now you know it's a risk so you can take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again.