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Dog Training advice-Eating small critters!

Biggbass

Biggbass

Dec 14, 2011
5,629
7,961
Planet Earth
#1
My dog is a year old mixed breed of Rotty//Belgian Shepherd, female, very affectionate, loves companionship, well behaved, and obedience trained. But she has developed a habit that is
a bit gross, which I'm curious as to how we might train her out of...

We live on some acreage and have a mole population in some areas of the property that I've spent years trying to eliminate without success. I have not, BTW, called out a professional service to get rid of the moles...maybe that is the answer, but...continuing...my dog has started digging up the moles. She
sniffs them out, listens to them digging their tunnels, tracks & locates them with precision canine sonar skills, digs them up, and then eats them.

The upside to this is that she is helping rid the property of moles...sometimes several a day...one day she ate 5 of them! The downside is that she throws them up 10-15 min later, in one big heave of partially digested mole/dog food, which occasionally happens in the house. The latest purge was just last night at 10pm after she'd come in from her end of the day yard break. I flew out of bed a the first sound of 'dog about to throw up", trying to get the front door open before she does, only to arrive late to the puke party and end up having to scoop up the pile of purge and clean the floor.

I'm open for suggestions...but now that I've written this I am thinking that maybe calling a pro to de-mole the property may be the best solution. :)
 
#2
So to my mind your problem starts and ends with the word "Shepherd". You've got a mix of two herding breeds that wants something to herd and has found it. We own and train herding dogs (Border Collies) and train other breeds as service dogs so I can speak from a little experience on this.

All herding dogs have one thing in common: they need something to do. Doesn't matter what this is. Herding sheep or cattle, frisbee, fetch, picking up their toys and putting them in a box, chasing small animals, etc, etc - all are acceptable to the herding dog. You just need to give them some sort of a structured "job" that they can work at on a regular basis. They've been bred for generations to go out every day and work the fields for hours on end. You can't get that out of them. They will always feel the need for a regular occupation of some sort.

Problems start quickly if you don't specify the job. In that case they will find something to do on their own and there is a tremendously high probability that you will be very displeased with the occupation they choose. Tons of herding breeds end up in shelters every year because they picked a career on their own. Most of them go into fields like furniture refinishing, garden excavation, and residential demolition. There are classic tales of bored herding dogs removing the upholstery from entire rooms of furniture or digging trenches 2 yards long and a several feet deep in a single afternoon. We lost the flooring on half of our master bathroom one day when we left a Border Collie puppy (PUPPY!) alone in there for about two hours. My favorite story is about a collie who would hide his ball under the sofa, jump up on the cushions, and then try to dig down to get the ball. Charming behaviors like this develop fast in dogs with nothing else to do.

The dig and chase behaviour you're seeing is typical of a herding dog that's looking for something to work on. She needs a job, she found one. To her it's simple as that. The problem starts when you try to train that out of her. You can't. In my experience there's no way to just eliminate that behavior and turn her into a lap dog. She's going to work whether you like it or not. All you can do is replace the unwanted behavior with something less destructive. If you just get rid of the moles and nothing more the dog will simply find some other lovely mess to present you with. Herding dogs that are left without work to stimulate them will literally go insane.

With a dog that size and the availability of a large yard frisbee or fetch is usually the way to go. I have a Border Collie (same one who destroyed the flooring) who needs at least two 30-minute frisbee sessions every day to keep her happy. On days when it's too wet or cold for me to feel like going outside I substitute fetch up and down the stairs and some tug-o-war. She's also got some puzzle toys to keep her mind occupied. If she doesn't get that kind of stimulation every day all hell breaks loose. If I miss even one play session she'll spend the next several hours desperately trying to herd our highly-uncooperative cat from room to room. Let it go for a day and she'll start looking for shoes that need alteration. Let it slide for a couple of days and she switches into Terminator Mode. Nothing in the house is safe at that point. Just give her a frisbee to chase, though, and she's the best dog the world ever saw.

So I would first try repurposing the dog for another job and behavior. When you see her going after a mole tell her "no" in a stern voice, make her come to you, and be ready to treat her immediately when she obeys. Use her name and look her in the eye when giving her the commands. Then grab a ball or frisbee right away and have a little 5 or 10 minute play session. Also add in more general fun time every day to keep her stimulated. Herding dogs like to be with their people more than they like to be with moles so she should quickly get the idea and start coming to you for playtime when she's bored instead of chasing things and digging up the yard. Keep this up for a few weeks and she'll probably start leaving the critters alone.

It sounds like you just got a lot of herding instinct in this one. You ain't gonna stop that. Just have to direct it into a place that you can live with. Good luck with it. Herding dogs can be tough when they have a lot of drive like that.

Cheers,
Dan.
 
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#3
Some dogs will eat anything, vets and owners can tell tons of stories and I've watched vet videos of all kinds of stuff being surgically removed from dog stomachs.
I had a little stray feist/terrier that adopted me years ago, they are squirrel rodent dogs. Dusty would dig moles to the ends of the earth and kill them, but never ate them.
Recently,I got a rat infestation due to my carelessness in the shed where I keep my dog food and straw.
Two bars of Ramik and many rats later, I would see my present dog Dudley , also a ratting breed, parading around with a frozen rat in his mouth last winter, but he never ate one either.
I guess what I'm getting at is sometimes dogs have the quirk of eating strange things, just as an individual trait irrespective of their inbred drive. He may be one.
 
#4
Bass_Pounder said:
You've never eaten "pigs in a blanket" ?
Click to expand...

InterL said:
...So to my mind your problem starts and ends with the word "Shepherd". You've got a mix of two herding breeds that wants something to herd and has found it. We own and train herding dogs (Border Collies) and train other breeds as service dogs so I can speak from a little experience on this.

All herding dogs have one thing in common: they need something to do. Doesn't matter what this is. Herding sheep or cattle, frisbee, fetch, picking up their toys and putting them in a box, chasing small animals, etc, etc - all are acceptable to the herding dog. You just need to give them some sort of a structured "job" that they can work at on a regular basis. They've been bred for generations to go out every day and work the fields for hours on end. You can't get that out of them. They will always feel the need for a regular occupation of some sort.

Problems start quickly if you don't specify the job. In that case they will find something to do on their own and there is a tremendously high probability that you will be very displeased with the occupation they choose. Tons of herding breeds end up in shelters every year because they picked a career on their own. Most of them go into fields like furniture refinishing, garden excavation, and residential demolition. There are classic tales of bored herding dogs removing the upholstery from entire rooms of furniture or digging trenches 2 yards long and a several feet deep in a single afternoon. We lost the flooring on half of our master bathroom one day when we left a Border Collie puppy (PUPPY!) alone in there for about two hours. My favorite story is about a collie who would hide his ball under the sofa, jump up on the cushions, and then try to dig down to get the ball. Charming behaviors like this develop fast in dogs with nothing else to do.

The dig and chase behaviour you're seeing is typical of a herding dog that's looking for something to work on. She needs a job, she found one. To her it's simple as that...
Click to expand...

Funny you would mention this. I've got a blue healer and sh'e getting on up in years, so I've thought about getting another dog and I've been leaning toward another healer. To that end I went looking and found a big ranch that uses them and sells excess stock when the have a littler and don't need all the dogs for their operation. I'm talking to the ranch owner on the phone and I ask about herd training and he told me they don't train their dogs, "they just learn from their momma", and later in the conversation he told me this, "blue healer is a working dog, if you don't give them a job they will find one on their own." Mine was rescue from Katrina and within a short time she had organized the neighborhood dogs into a pack. We wound up having to keep her in the house for a while when folks started complaining about their dogs being gone all the time. While she was on lock down, her pack would gather in the field in front of our gate every morning waiting for her to show up. it took a couple weeks for them to give up. We wound up having to get another dog so she could hava a mini pack of one, and she's satisfied to stay at home with her new friend.

As for eating small animals. I had a dobie who would go after anything smaller than her that was not another dog. And just as you describe after gulping down a ground squirrel whole, she would hark it back up a short time later. In winter she lived inside, only venturing out to do her business than back in most days. One night I let her out for he final go of the night and she was back in the usual time. She went to her bed and within minutes I heard her gagging and knew what was about to happen. I got her out on to the back porch where she harked up the back half of a rabbit.
 
#5
I'm a little surprised that those dogs can't keep it down. When I was a kid, we had shepherd mutts, and they would keep the property vermin free. That included cats, large ground hogs, rabbits, the occasional deer. You name it. If it wandered through, it was fair game for them. Those dogs are long gone now. They spend nearly all their time outside, and it was good and rural where we lived. They never bothered with anything beyond the property line. I'm not sure how they knew where it was, but they did. Go figure.
 
#7
Yep, to me it seems like the real problem is somehow keeping the dog from regurgitating all of its kills. After all, it is good to take car of the vermin like moles and ground hogs.

Maybe the dog is regurgitating it so YOU can share eating it? :) You know, bringing food home for the pack critters who didn't go out hunting with it?
 
#8
Gaolee said:
I'm a little surprised that those dogs can't keep it down. When I was a kid, we had shepherd mutts, and they would keep the property vermin free. That included cats, large ground hogs, rabbits, the occasional deer. You name it. If it wandered through, it was fair game for them. Those dogs are long gone now. They spend nearly all their time outside, and it was good and rural where we lived. They never bothered with anything beyond the property line. I'm not sure how they knew where it was, but they did. Go figure.
Click to expand...
Vet told us dogs used to ''dog food'' can't handle the real thing and upchuck.
 
#9
I see. I didn't know that. It never occurred to me that dogs wouldn't eat what they caught. Those two sure did. They were pretty amazing hunters. After they died, the property filled up with all kinds of other animals pretty fast. That was more than 30 years ago.
 
#12
More than likely it's the sudden change in food type that's causing the issues. If my dog eats something other than the food he's on (even if it's more dog food) he'll throw up. Not sure how you can curb the dog's natural instinct to hunt and eat.

I would suggest sectioning off a part of your property and making that "mole free" before setting your dog loose.
 
#14
My healers first self appointed task was cleaning up all the desiccated piles of small animal remains on our 4 (very wooded) acres. She would find them and bring them down to the back porch and leave them there for us, sometimes 2 or 3 a day. She didn't play with them or tear them up, just brought what looked like a wad of dirty fur with random bones stuck to it. Sometimes the source animal could be ID'd but most times it was just a lot of old random bits held together by whatever it is that holds dried up old rotten flesh and fur together. It was fairly regular for a few days, then it stopped as quickly as it began. If the place was not fenced I believe she would have just continued to clean up. Not that I think the fence would even slow her down much if she wanted out. It was not until I talked to the guy who used healers on his ranch that I realized it was just our little girl taking care of business. She is also an excellent rat dog which is surprising given her size.
Here she is pretending to be a silly goose pigdog.
IMG_3300.JPG
 
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