I’ll join the chorus: It’s not remotely weird for a dog with good hunting instincts.
Some modern breeds of dog have had the hunting instinct bred out of them, or nearly bred out of them.
But even if your dogs are of those breeds: if your dogs haven’t ever been loose around loose chickens: you don’t know for sure how they’d behave. So if the situation comes up, exercise caution.
As others have said: even in a dog with strong hunting instincts, it’s trainable behavior. The prey instinct won’t disappear; but the definition of what’s prey is learned behavior. For dogs with really strong instincts, training needs to start with young puppies – considerably younger than 14 months. Training an older hunting-breed dog not to hunt particular species may be possible, but it’s going to be a whole lot more work, and with some individuals may even then only stop them if their human’s immediately present. Puppies who may be off-leash around livestock need to be trained starting as young pups. All dogs in this society should be trained about cats starting as young pups.
Training about cats can be, and often is, done by a cat. Not all cats know how to do it, though.
He presumably saw you being gentle and cautious around the hamster. And did not first encounter it running away while he was loose.
Border collies generally have a lot of brains; and at least part of their instincts are going to be telling them that their humans likely keep other species who will be the dog’s job to protect. If they watch their humans treating a member of another species as a creature to be cared for, they’re likely to do likewise – at least for that particular individual, and possibly for the species as a whole.
Our Staffy/Pit/Shar-Pei mix has a very strong chase/kill drive. Mostly for rodents, which is fine because we have way too many voles and gophers. AFAIK hes has not caught any bunnies yet (not for lack of trying), but we might never know because he’s proven he would just eat them. I would not introduce him to chickens without a lot of training.
I’m a Labrador person with a LOT of cats. All my dogs are trained by the house cats as to who rules the roost. They are also trained by me that they must not even think about harassing the cats, the other dog, or people. But even my squishy, soft tempered Lab who adores her cats in the house (sleeps with them, lets them swat her off her bed, actively looks for attention from them) will chase the barn cats if they run. If they stand or come towards her she’s as loving as before, but if she’s in an “up” mood and something runs from her outside she WILL chase it. Now, what she’d actually do if she caught it is anyone’s guess, but it doesn’t take much for a dog to kill something smaller, even inadvertently.
Though I would add that the hunting instinct is not remotely associated with aggression towards humans in my experience so that bit of her story (that the dog was also aggressive towards humans) I’d be less inclined to believe. It actually made it more disturbing (to a sheltered non-hunter like myself) that my friend’s lovely family dog would suddenly start killing things.
Kristi Noam was on Face the Nation, this morning and, naturally, flat refused to answer any questions about the Kim story.
Her cognitive dissonance is staggering.
Margaret Brennan, who is usually unflappable, was so visibly incensed it was impossible to ignore. I can only imagine she was ranting during the commercial break; an off-camera producer had to get her attention when they came back.
I had a 10 lb floof who loved to chase squirrels and possums out of his yard. One time, we had a baby possum that was too little and to stupid to run: it stood and hissed. He was so confused, he juat stood there and barked, both of them trapped in a loop. He didnt flinch when i picked him up and carried him inside. The possum must have figured out how ro move on, after.
“Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people,” she told her interviewer, Margaret Brennan. “So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog?”
Commander was sent to an undisclosed location after the Secret Service recorded 24 biting episodes involving him between October 2022 and July 2023, about half of which required medical attention.
Noem tried deflecting blame on the media, which didn’t work. Now she’s blaming the Bidens. How will MAGAites resolve the conflict between the love they have for their dogs and their inclination to attack the Bidens?
I once had a dog who slept with, loved on, and actively played with her own cats and never harmed a one, kill an intruding cat.
I had screaming hysterics at her and she dropped the body, went into full submissive mode, and never did any such thing again. But it can happen. (No, I didn’t shoot the dog. I even let her keep playing with her own cats, though I was very cautious the first couple of days – until I noted that she herself was also being extra cautious and avoiding the rougher games.)
I doubt yours would kill a barn cat known to her. But she might kill a strange one who wanders in.
I agree; especially if the dog had never done such a thing before.
What I might believe happened (if at this point I were believing anything Noem says) is that an overexcited dog bit at her without realizing who she was biting at, and perhaps made contact with her teeth before she could stop herself. Grabbing at a dog who’s in the middle of killing something (or of fighting something, such as another dog) can get the grabbing human bitten, even if the dog would never do such a thing under other conditions. (So can grabbing an injured dog.)
For one thing – if the dog seriously attacked Noem: where’s the emergency room visit? Any kind of dog bite from a dog of any size that doesn’t call for one (given the availability of emergency rooms) can’t have been a serious attack. (Ditto cats, by the way. They can do you a whole lot more harm than most people realize, because they so rarely attack humans full force.)
Possum wasn’t being stupid at all. Act like prey, you’ll be treated like prey. Never run unless you’re sure running will work.
(Admittedly, possums are quite stupid; and that one may just have gotten it right by accident. When I first moved here, I fed some cats out in the barn. I once came across a possum eating the cat food. It ran from me – and ran right into the side of a large metal tool box, way too heavy for it to move. It didn’t move sideways to get around it, or try to get over it, or turn to face me and hiss, or even fall over and play dead. It just kept pushing its head into the side of the toolbox, trying its best to run through it. If I had wanted to kill a possum, it would have been easy. Instead, I went away, and eventually it did too. [ETA: on further recollection, I think I picked up a large metal bucket, put it over the possum, slid a board over the top of the bucket, and carried the whole assembly out into a field and dumped the possum out. Kind of an oversize version of my wasp-removal technique.)]
I got those cats to come into the house and quit feeding cats in the barn.
– I think the Bidens should have re-homed Commander a lot sooner; he clearly wasn’t suited to be in a situation in which multiple strangers who don’t know about dogs kept coming up to his humans. I hope the dog went to somebody who knows how to handle aggressive dogs, and not just to somewhere where nobody’s paying much attention. But I will say that if half those bites didn’t need medical attention – that dog wasn’t biting very hard.
Kristi Noem calls dog shooting report ‘fake news’ but insists on need to kill animal
“First, I will prove that I never rented a car from the plaintiff. Second, I will prove that the car was already damaged when I drove it off the lot. Third, I will prove that the damages resulted from a collision where the other driver was entirely at fault. Fourth, I will prove that the car was in perfect condition when I returned it.”
They’ve successfully managed for I-don’t-know how long. Unloved, unappreciated and unwanted.
I agree they can get into fixes around the human intruders and litter the highways with their little dead bodies.
I had a remarkable relationship with one for an all too short period. He proved to be very intelligent.
Our Luc was the only one of our dachshunds who had a really strong prey drive (he also was a spurlauter). We took him to a local dog park that was a longish rectangle with large oak trees – one at either end. There were a lot of sparrows grazing under the trees, and Luc would charge at the flock who would easily fly up into the tree before he could get to them. He’d turn and charge toward the other tree, and the sparrows came down again. The sparrows at the other tree would fly up into the tree as he came charging him towards them, so, he’d turn again and race back to the other tree. Rinse and repeat. Great exercise for him with little to no effort on our part.
It’s the cry of a dog when it sights prey or is on the trail of prey. It is abnormally loud and shrill – sounds like he’s being tortured. It’s meant to let the hunter know where the prey is, and since dachshunds go underground after badgers, they have to be especially loud to be heard. The hunter will hear the dog and then dig there to get the badger. We eventually got him trained to, first, be not quite so loud, then, not to do it every time he saw a squirrel. We had a lot of squirrels around!
Beagles always sound to me like they’ve just been hit by a car. I don’t know how you’re supposed to tell if they’ve actually just been hit by a car (and would prefer not to find out.) I prefer not to live with beagles. They may be excellent dogs otherwise; I just can’t stand to listen to them.
The only dachshunds I’ve known were pretty quiet; but that was years ago, and they weren’t hunting anything, other than possibly my parents’ Old English Sheepdog who was in heat. She ignored the dachshund entirely, and the poor dog couldn’t reach high enough to get at her.
Someone told us that once out on the sidewalk after Luc had treed a squirrel. He’d see them running along the cable lines running between the utility poles and start screeching from across the street. We had one beagle once, but she was a lazy chowhound.
Yeah, Luc was definitely the noisiest we ever had. He was a real character.
