Fly and our Karma dog still go at it now and then. Karma is 12 years old and at the end of the Catahoula life span and has always been alpha dog and won’t give up her position, so the best we can hope for here is an uneasy truce between bouts.

With that said, working/hunting dogs really are the most amazing creatures once you understand what’s been hardwired into their behavior. And like you learned, sometimes that means that Shih Tzu, Pug and cat are also on the menu.

Recently though, and probably deserving of her own blog post, is a stray who seems to be adopting us. Fly, eater of female dogs and the stray, Daisy, have become friends and even play together. Then again, Daisy is a house pet and very submissive to everyone. It’s such a contrast between Fly, the killing machine and Daisy, the I-just-met-you-and-I-love-you dog.

As far as training Fly to be a hunter, yes and no. We’re training her that there are hunts we approve of and those we do not. Hunting the family chickens is not acceptable, but she can have all the mice she wants.

Before you move out to the farm permanently, start training for off leash walking. She’ll probably set up a pattern of running large circles around you as she searches through the vegetation, but encourage her to stay close and come when called. An electronic collar with a beep function is the best thing. It’s like training to a clicker, but gives you a lot of distance. Probably called a Shock collar, but nothing says you have to zap your poor pooch. Just use the beep.

She sounds a lot like our Sophie, who’s an utter-nutter too. She has THE most amazing prey-drive anywhere. She was “bred” by a puppy farmer to be used as a cattle dog and, when she was 10 weeks old, she walked off the farm she was bred on, onto our farm because she smelled the BBQ frying dinner. She walked over a Kilometer, at 10 weeks of age, because she smelled food.

Long story short – I figured if she really wanted us THAT much, I guess she picked us. So we brought her home (the farm’s a weekend farm, we live 3 hours drive away).

As you can imagine, with a personality like that, she could have VERY easily ended up an alpha-of-the-family, but, alas, I had other plans…

She’s now settled in with her big brother (our other dog, Oliver), who, thankfully, quickly showed her who was boss. I was a bit worried about that because he has such a docile temper…

She has been ‘suspended’ from obedience school because of her prey drive (She kept screaming – no, really, SCREAMING – to be allowed to get to the other dogs, which is extremely distracting), and we were asked to ‘work with her at home and come back when she’s more mature’. I’ve trained dogs before, so really this wasn’t a problem, but as for socialising, which she desperately needed, we found a great dog park near us and go there a couple of evenings a week so she meets lots and lots of other dogs and gets to run around with them.

She’s nearly 2 now and doing really well.
This is her: http://www.dogheirs.com/larysa/dogs/2641-sophie-sox

I’ll look forward to your stories, are you going to try to train the hunter out of Fly?
I ask, because I’m supposed to move down to the farm permanently in a year or so, and I admit I’m worried about Sophie going utterly berzerk on 400 acres covered in wildlife (I don’t want to see what she’s going to do with chasing kangaroos… eek!)

Thanks for your fantastic story.

Larysa…