His Business? Hiring and Managing Dogs to Chase Geese.
His Business? Hiring and Managing Dogs to Chase Geese.
Robert Young explains how the birds can be a menace and why Border Collies are his star employees.
from The New York Times
In 1998, Robert Young and his dog, Boomer, were visiting a golf course in New Jersey when a man asked Mr. Young for his business card.
Mr. Young, a physician assistant at the time, handed him a card for orthopedic work, but the man was confused. “He just kind of looked at my card and he goes, ‘Don’t you chase geese for a living?’” Mr. Young said.
At this point, Mr. Young looked down at Boomer. His Border collie had chased gaggles of honking, excreting Canada geese from the course just minutes earlier.
And hence, his new business Geese Chasers — one of many goose-chasing businesses across the country — was born.
The company, which Mr. Young runs with his wife, Deborah Young, now has a presence in 10 states and hundreds of towns and cities, including New York City, where a dog can sometimes be spotted clearing Central Park. The following interview is an edited and condensed version of a conversation with Mr. Young.
According to Birdlife International, the number of geese has increased by 1,500 percent in North America over the last 40 years. Why?
Geese migrate south from the Arctic Circle and Canada in the winter. Their primary food source is grass, and it gets covered up by snow. They have to go south to find areas of barren land that don’t have snow. Winters have not been harsh in much of the United States, so they’ve kind of dug in and call it home now, and they’re really moving around from feeding spot to feeding spot locally. It’s estimated by the federal government that the Canada goose population in this country increases annually by 15 to 20 percent.
What kind of flight pattern do they follow?
Where we sit is called the Atlantic Flyway. But you also have the Mississippi Flyway, and I think they call the one in the Northwest the Rocky Mountain Flyway, which is probably less traveled, I’d say. But we get calls from Scottsdale, San Francisco, Palm Springs, places you would never think would have a goose problem. They’re everywhere. They acclimate really well. If they have a good food source, plenty of fresh cut grass and plenty of bodies of water, which a lot of these homeowners associations and commercial properties build — you know, the ponds and everything for runoff and also for aesthetics — they’ve got the perfect habitat.
Is it just the excrement left behind by the geese that your clients dislike?
Well, they tear up landscapes. When they eat grass, they pull it up by the roots, and what they leave behind in their feces is very acidic, and that changes the pH of the soil. So only hardened weeds grow on the spot. They do a lot of damage quickly.
Describe the perfect goose habitat. What are the components?
A wide-open field with fresh-cut grass that gives them really good sight lines, so they can see a predator coming. There’s usually one or two lookouts that stick their necks out and look around for predators while the others are feeding. They’re really smart animals. They’re also looking for a nice body of water that they can either fly into or swim into or bring their babies into.
So that means parks and gated communities. What else?
Oh, jeez — you name it. In New York and Jersey City, we have a lot of properties right along the Hudson, where the Sully plane went down. Bird strikes in general occur many times annually and globally to commercial and private aircraft. It is not only geese but anything with feathers that flies.
But the geese must come right back.
We did a study many years ago where we tracked them over 12 weeks. We found that after two chases they stay away for two weeks. If you chase them four times, they stay away for four weeks.
Why are dogs — Border collies in particular — best for the job?
Grounds for Sculpture had us in over the summer. They were excited to bring us in because of our humane methods. Sometimes the federal government will come in and gas the geese. You can hire the U.S.D.A. You just fill out an application and get a proposal for an estimate, and they’ll come one day and round them up and put them in gas chambers and suck the oxygen out of their lungs. It’s disturbing. If you go on PETA, you’ll see they endorse our methods. Highly trained Border collies are the best option.
As for the kind of dog, I did a lot of trial and error in the beginning. I tried Australian shepherds, Labs. The geese weren’t afraid of them. Border collies mimic arctic foxes, which are their only natural predators. An Arctic fox looks exactly like a Border collie.
That’s something you found out by accident.
I learned the hard way. I’m really allergic to dogs, but the minute my son opened his eyes, let me tell you something, he wanted one. Border collies need stimulation every day. They’re working dogs. We had a lake behind our house, and Boomer was chasing everything with a feather out of it, ducks, cormorants, anything that moved. When he finally chased the last duck out, he’d come out almost passed out and he’d be ready to do it all over again. I would say, “You’re nuts, dog.”
That’s when you started bringing him to the golf course?
One day the owner of the country club told me he’d been reading about a golf course in the Midwest that had used Border collies to get rid of geese effectively. He said there were 500 birds on his course and so much poop that they couldn’t play golf. Then he asked, “Do you think that dog will chase them?” On the first day, Boomer took off like a shot. He knew exactly where to go. Next thing you know, the entire sky is filled with geese. Then he jumped into a gigantic pond like Superdog.
And that’s where you got your first paying gig, with the golfer who asked for your business card?
Mike. To this day, he’s a client. I told him I would never raise the price on him. We still keep his property clear for 99 bucks a week. Now it would run him three or four times that.
It must get expensive to clear a place like Central Park. Do you need a pack of Border collies to remove geese from such a huge area?
No, no. It’s only one or two dogs. These are independent working dogs. I tell my franchisers, when you get two really good working dogs together, they’re so stinking smart that one dog might say to himself, ‘Why should I go out there when he can do the job without me?’ For Central Park, they’ll get there maybe at 7 a.m., and I think they stay only a couple of hours and they’re out by 9 or 9:30.
How do people respond when you tell them you chase geese for a living?
My parents thought I was going to be put in a mental institution. But people get really happy when they see the dogs and understand we’re giving them a great life, where they can run every day. People have seen me sitting in the car with the dog and they’ll go, “You’ve got the best job in the world! You get to work with your best friend every day.”
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