{"id":1292,"date":"2023-04-17T19:52:54","date_gmt":"2023-04-17T19:52:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geesechasers.com\/?p=991"},"modified":"2026-03-27T18:48:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-27T18:48:14","slug":"london-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geesechasers.com\/staging\/london-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Want to get rid of a goose? Take a gander at these border collies"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Want to get rid of a goose? Take a gander at these border collies<\/h2>\n<p><em>from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thetimes.co.uk\/article\/want-to-get-rid-of-a-goose-take-a-gander-at-these-border-collies-cm5s3pw35\">The Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"td-post-author-name\">\n<div class=\"td-author-by\"><em>By <\/em><em><strong><span class=\"author\">Will Pavia<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<div class=\"td-author-line\"><em>\u00a0&#8211;<\/em><em><span class=\"td-post-date\"><time class=\"entry-date updated td-module-date\" datetime=\"2023-02-22T13:00:38-05:00\">April 17, 2023<\/time><\/span><\/em><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"p1\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Boomer was a border collie. \u201cHis grandfather was from the Scottish Highlands,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">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.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_993\" style=\"width: 410px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-993\" class=\"wp-image-993\" src=\"https:\/\/geesechasers.com\/staging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/london-dog-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"224\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-993\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A company called Geese Chasers sends out the dogs to drive the birds from golf courses, lawns and parks<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"p1\">In Connecticut, a rival company deploys 12 border collies, all raised in the kennels of a sheepdog trainer in North Carolina. \u201cAll our dogs are trained with traditional sheep-herding commands,\u201d said Chris Santopietro, 57, the proprietor. \u201cBasically you are substituting the sheep with geese. They\u2019re not touching or harming the geese. We are introducing what [the geese] think is a predator.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">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\u2019s suburbs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">\u201cEvery time they build a corporate park, they have a pond for run-off,\u201d Santopietro said. \u201cThey are nicely landscaped, with plenty of green grass for the geese to eat.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">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 <i>E. coli.<\/i><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">\u201cEach goose averages two pounds of droppings a day,\u201d Santopietro said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">In <i>The Anthropocene Reviewed<\/i>, the writer John Green devotes a chapter to Canada geese as a creature of the suburbs, a native of man-made landscapes. \u201cThe world contains between four and five million Canada geese, although from where I\u2019m sitting in Indianapolis, that estimate seems low, as there appear to be four or five million just in my backyard,\u201d he writes. He said they lived in urban areas at roughly the same ratio (3:1) as American humans. Whatever else you did, \u201cyou, as an individual, can\u2019t do much about the Canada goose,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">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: \u201cIs that a border collie? He said: \u2018You don\u2019t see many around any more,\u2019 \u201d Young said. \u201cI said: \u2018Yes there is a good reason for it. They will drive you nuts. They are working dogs. I don\u2019t have anything for this dog to do.\u2019 He said: \u2018Well, my course is overrun with Canada geese.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">He suggested that Young bring his dog to the course and let him chase geese. Young, who worked in orthopaedic surgery as a physician\u2019s 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 \u201cwere costing him about $20,000 a year in damage to his property,\u201d Young said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">Boomer, whom Young regards as the founder of his company, died in 2008. \u201cStill think about the ol\u2019 boy every day,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\"><span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Want to get rid of a goose? Take a gander at these border collies from The Times By Will Pavia \u00a0&#8211;April 17, 2023 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. \u201cHis [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":992,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,2],"tags":[21,22],"class_list":["post-1292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-news","tag-london-times","tag-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Want to get rid of a goose? Take a gander at these border collies - Geesechasers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"How trained Border Collies help remove Canada geese from golf courses, parks, and lawns. 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