The adventure begins.

   This week, spring break, my husband and I decided to take the leap and buy some baby chicks.  We have had a chicken coop built for just about 9 months but there weren't baby chicks available to buy until now.  I want chickens because they're entertaining, they're great at composting your kitchen scraps, their manure is good for the garden, and the best way to get healthy eggs is from your own chickens.  Just one draw-back to chickens...I have a very active, intelligent klein poodle named Jedi.  He loves to chase animals, large and small.  He chases critters as small as butterflies and as large as cows.  Not only does he chase animals, he has killed ground squirrels, mice and moles at my school.  I should also add that as a puppy, he caught one of my moms chickens for me...I was trying to catch one, he figured out what I was doing and he caught it and pinned it until I retrieved it.  So he doesn't exactly have a great background for living peacefully with chickens.  However, he is very intelligent and easy to train for a lot of things...but with the busy-ness of teaching...I've slacked a lot on reinforcing his manners and training.  My students continue to keep up his tricks and retrieving...but I've only worked with him maybe once a month...so this blog is going to contain the adventures of me working on making him chicken safe...and maybe even a chicken defender.
    My minimum goal:  that Jedi will be able to be let out into the yard, with the chickens safely in their coop, and  he will not spend his time running around the coop and hounding at the chickens.  My ultimate goal:  that Jedi will be safe in the yard with the chickens loose in the yard, calmly ignoring them or even enjoying their company, and will even chase off possible chicken predators.  I do realize that goal may take ages.

   So Thursday March 28th we got 3 baby chicks from our local feed store.  They were sold to us as Welsummers but I could tell when we walked in the store that they weren't Welsummer chicks.  So I did research and determined that most likely they are Golden-laced Wyandottes.  Which I am happy with.  They are beautiful birds that lay a nice golden-brown egg and lay about 200 eggs a year.  Of course I won't know for sure what they are until they are adults.  They were sold to us as pullets (young hens) and I hope that is correct because it's illegal to keep roosters on residential property in Paradise and I would hate to give a chicken away after I've spent a lot of time bonding with it.
  Anyways, we got the chicks set up in a box in the garage.  I did not introduce them to Jedi at that time because we also had my sisters dog, Evi, for a few days and I didn't want to have to work with both of them at once, plus I wanted the chicks to have a chance to settle into their new home.  It wasn't a problem, with Evi around, even when Jedi was in the garage he never even looked in the direction of the box.  We never had him in the garage on his own but we did some work on the drip system and, of course, going to and from the car he went through the garage.

   Last night, March 30th, we returned Evi to my sister.  On returning to the house, he immediately ran over to the shelf where the chicks box was and started going on his hind legs trying to get to them.  So I decided to show him what was there.  I had him sit and I took out a baby chick in my hands.  He started to break his sit but I put him back into it and held the chick and talked quietly to it for about 5 seconds while he watched, then I put the chick back and praised Jedi greatly and took him inside the house.  He was still very interested and stood at the door to our garage with his nose against it for about a minute before coming away and calming down.  About an hour later I took him into the garage with some cheese...and the chicks might as well have not been there.  Cheese is a very high value reward for him and we played games with the laundry basket and did tricks and such and he didn't even glance towards their box.

  Today, March 31st, I had to clean out the chicks box.  Jedi definitely wanted to go into the garage with me.  I kept him out and cleaned out the chicks box, but then brought their temporary box into the house with the chicks in it.  I had some chicken jerky for working with Jedi.  He was very distracted.  Without their heat lamp the chicks were peeping very loudly, plus the box was closer to the ground (I had it on the hearth of our gas stove).  In other words, I raised the difficulty but lowered the reward (cheese is a much more valuable reward to Jedi then jerky...although he loves that as well).  He was able to sit close to the box, but "down" and "touch" were out of the question on his own and I would have to pull him into the position if I asked for it.  So I moved him into the sun room, where he could still see the box through the glass doors but we had increased the distance.  Now he would sit, down, and touch but he kept his eyes on the box.  I did the game where you don't get a treat until you look at me...and it would take about 10 seconds for him to look away from the chicks...but he got jackpots when he did.  After about a minute of that we put the chicks back in their home box.  I think for our other two training sessions today we'll go back to just working in the garage with the chick box up high and see how he does.  And the next time I bring them closer to his level...I'll definitely make sure I have higher value treats on me.  I plan to blog about each training session so it will help me monitor what I've done and what's worked and what hasn't.  Maybe it will help others who have dogs and chickens and maybe it will help me in case I need to train other dogs to be around chickens in the future.