prey-driven dogs and other critters

It is not about teaching what is prey and what isnt, so much as teaching the dog not to act on the behavior without permission.  It is about teaching a "leave it" that extends to any animal or situation that is named.  It may also generalize to local, familiar environments even if you are not present every moment.

Exactly.  Very much like telling the dog when to herd the sheep and when to lie down and not herd the sheep. []

Very good advice. I will have to apply this to teaching Tojo not to kill chickens and such.

Some people keep telling me you can't teach a shiba inu not to kill chickens, but I definitely don't think that's true.

"watch" has been working better for me than "leave it" when it comes to critters. "watch" gives her something to do.

I also use the watch command for the same reason- to keep her doing something else.  I own a cat, three guinea pigs, and two parakeets- all of which have never been harmed by my pointer who didn't grow up with them and is very prey driven.  After about a month of constant supervision with the parakeets- in the cage of course- Casey will no longer bother them.  Her birds to hunt are outside, anything inside is off limits.  She will also touch the guinea pigs.  Never bite them or try to harm them- just sniff.  Of course I would never believe that any rey driven dog is ever 100% reliable, but it's quite reachable to get the dog up to 95% reliablity.

Erl, thanks, that was encouraging.

I believe that I can train Tojo to leave other animals alone, but I posted this question on a shiba inu email group and I was basically laughed out of there by most of the people and everyone told me I needed to do my research, because I must not know they're prey-driven. Needless to say, they hadn't ever actually tried to train their shibas to leave other animals alone, they just assumed it was impossible.

There were three people who had shibas and chickens, and of those, two of them have never had a problem, so it seems it's not so impossible after all!

At any rate, I wouldn't ever take Tojo outside and leave him to run around with chickens unsupervised, that's just asking for trouble. I will have about 100 acres, so I don't see why I can't put a reasonable distance between the different animals, but obviously, no fence is foolproof, and I want a dog that will most likely not bother the chickens if given the chance.


Anyway, thanks again!