How can I teach a dog to stop chasing cats?

On Apr 9, 8:11*pm, Jasper Tiler wrote:
How can I teach a dog to stop chasing cats?

Step up and be more proactive. Put a leash on your dog when the cat is
around. Reward him for ignoring the cat, prevent him from chasing the
cat. Don't give your dog the opportunity to chase the cat, period.
Teach him a good leave-it command, but you don't start teaching leave-
it with a highly desirable object like a cat. When you aren't there to
supervise make sure the dog and cat are safely contained away from
each other, otherwise you could come home to a dead cat. The more
opportunities you allow for the dog to chase the cat the harder it
will be to stop.

For leave-it simply hold a boring piece of kibble in your hand, close
your fist, say leave-it once and once only. Don't move your hand and
wait for him to give up trying to get the kibble. When he does say Yes
(to mark when he stops) and give him a high value treat from your
other hand (do not use the higher value treat to bribe him away, keep
the high value treat behind your back or even up on a shelf). He does
not get the treat you told him to leave-it. You will find that with
3-5 reps of this he'll start to get it. Work up to higher value items,
work up to leaving something that is on the floor. Make it harder and
harder as he's getting it and finally work up to leaving the cat
alone.

Lauralyn
Raw fed agility dogs
Shylo, Cheyenne, Lakota, Shylo

On Thu, 09 Apr 2009 20:11:55 -0700, Jasper Tiler wrote:

How can I teach a dog to stop chasing cats?

Lauralyn already have some good serious advice, so I'm going to take off
on a tangent with a funny about one of my past dobes, Atlas.

Atlas loved to chase cats. He made a big show of chasing and barking,
but he never hurt them. Upon catching up to a cat, he would grab it
around the middle (legs and tail out one end of his mouth, head and more
legs out the other), and bring it to us. Once he'd been acknowledged,
he'd drop the cat and the cat would run off.

Worrying that this was probably traumatizing (or at least really
irritating) the cats, we worked hard with Atlas to teach him to ignore
the cats. When that was finally successful, one cat would run up and
push on whatever part of the dog it could reach with its paws, then run
away. (If the cat could talk, it might have been saying "tag, you're
it!") It seemed to miss the attention!

--Susan