Dog Meets Chickens

We been worried about how Max would react to the chickens. When the chicks were about two weeks old I cupped Sunny backwards in my hand and let Max sniff her behind. I was horrified when he stuffed his snout forcibly through my hand and grabbed ahold of Sunny’s backside. Sunny screeched at the top of her little chickie lungs and I ripped Max off roughly enough to make him screech as well. We were all pretty traumatized for a few minutes….I thought Max had killed Sunny….and I thought I had killed Max. Ever since then we’ve kept the chickens and the dog separated. You can see Max peering in as Boo and Brett feed the chicks some tomatoes below:

This past weekend I started to let the chicks out during the day, usually when we plant to be outside working for a while so we can keep an eye on them. They don’t venture too far from the chicken run, they are still too “chicken” to wander. I took Max out with us too, but kept him on a leash. I would bring him close to the chickens and sit with him, having long talks about how he needed to protect them, not eat them. Max quickly lost interest in them.

Yesterday I let Max off the leash for the first time and he just sat lazily and watched them peck at the clover patches around him. At one point when he got up to start walking around….before I could do anything…FoShizzle took off running straight towards Max. She ran toward him so quickly that I thought she was going to attack him, but instead she put on the brakes inches from his face and stared at him as if saying, “Bring it.”  Max was so startled that he stood there frozen like a statue, wagging his tail a million times a minute:

I read an article yesterday about a loose dog that killed 280 chickens at a farm. I don’t think Max could kill 280 chickens, but he could probably kill seven if he wanted to.  I’m just happy that they are for now one big happy family.