Want to get rid of a goose? Take a gander at these border collies

from The Times

After Bob Young acquired a puppy named Boomer, he arrived home each evening to find that the dog had spent the day tearing up his house.

Boomer was a border collie. “His grandfather was from the Scottish Highlands,” said Young. He had been born on a dairy farm in Pennsylvania. But now he lived in the suburbs of New Jersey, far from the madding cow, or the disordered sheep. Then Young heard of a new line of work that was opening up for under-employed border collies like Boomer. They were needed to chase Canada geese.

Young is now the proprietor of Geese Chasers, a company based in New Jersey with franchised offices all over the United States, sending out border collies to drive geese from golf courses, lawns and parks.

In Connecticut, a rival company deploys 12 border collies, all raised in the kennels of a sheepdog trainer in North Carolina. “All our dogs are trained with traditional sheep-herding commands,” said Chris Santopietro, 57, the proprietor. “Basically you are substituting the sheep with geese. They’re not touching or harming the geese. We are introducing what [the geese] think is a predator.”

Geese chasing is a growth industry, thanks to a bird that has turned, in the space of about half a century, from an apparently threatened creature into an all-conquering invader of lawns and parklands across the country. An act protecting migratory birds ensured its safety and from 1970 to 2010 its numbers are estimated to have increased from a quarter of a million, to 3.5 million, even as new acres of geese-friendly territory are laid in America’s suburbs.

“Every time they build a corporate park, they have a pond for run-off,” Santopietro said. “They are nicely landscaped, with plenty of green grass for the geese to eat.”

Cemeteries, municipal parks, football fields and golf courses are also perfect goose habitats, but the birds do not treat them kindly. They tear the grass up, they drive off other birds and they leave large droppings that carry bacteria including E. coli.

“Each goose averages two pounds of droppings a day,” Santopietro said.

In The Anthropocene Reviewed, the writer John Green devotes a chapter to Canada geese as a creature of the suburbs, a native of man-made landscapes. “The world contains between four and five million Canada geese, although from where I’m sitting in Indianapolis, that estimate seems low, as there appear to be four or five million just in my backyard,” he writes. He said they lived in urban areas at roughly the same ratio (3:1) as American humans. Whatever else you did, “you, as an individual, can’t do much about the Canada goose,” he wrote.

He had clearly not heard of the goose-dog. Santopietro said that border collies appeared to the birds like arctic foxes or coyotes and when the birds fled for the safety of a pond, the dogs would follow them into the water, ensuring that they left the area entirely.

Young, of Geese Chasers, said he was throwing a ball for Boomer, his border collie pup, trying in vain to tire the dog out, when a passer-by, the proprietor of a local golf course, stopped and said: “Is that a border collie? He said: ‘You don’t see many around any more,’ ” Young said. “I said: ‘Yes there is a good reason for it. They will drive you nuts. They are working dogs. I don’t have anything for this dog to do.’ He said: ‘Well, my course is overrun with Canada geese.’ ”

He suggested that Young bring his dog to the course and let him chase geese. Young, who worked in orthopaedic surgery as a physician’s assistant, began doing that after work. Sitting with Boomer by the 18th hole one day, a former American footballer asked to hire the pair of them to clear geese from his garden that was set around a lake. They “were costing him about $20,000 a year in damage to his property,” Young said.

Boomer, whom Young regards as the founder of his company, died in 2008. “Still think about the ol’ boy every day,” he said. The American footballer remains a client. A dog and handler from Geese Chasers patrol his property daily, and he can summon them at any time if he sees a goose on his lawn.