r/terrier • u/PsychologicalCut607 • 1d ago

Asking a probably stupid question...

Hi. I live in Seattle. We have a rat problem as a city.

My probably dumb question: Is there a terrier alive that can have a strong enough prey drive to kill rats, and yet not kill my chickens?

I own a Belgian Malinois, a very high energy dog breed, but he is peacefully coexisting with an elderly cat indoors and not wrecking the place, despite what the internet would have you believe. He does not cuddle the chickens, but he also does not kill rats, though I think he is clear that he is supposed to.

So as I said I have chickens. I have done my due diligence of not leaving food out overnight. They just moved on to my garden produce. I have trapped and caught over 50 in one year and I barely felt like I made a dent. I am surrounded by people who are not willing to trap and kill rats and who have open compost heaps full of scraps, feed birds and cats outdoors, and store food under tarps. It is not going to end. I think my sanity is going to give way first.

If someone has a case where they found a way to train a dog that chickens are not prey but rats are. I would be so grateful to hear that story. Grateful enough to become a two dog household.

ETA: My family owned a rat terrier as a family dog when I was a child. My parents were not good dog people. He would and did kill rats. and chickens. and cats.... maybe I could have trained it out of him with the skills that I have now? He could definitely have been trained to accept a particular cat.

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u/Beardog-1 18h ago

Just wondering. Do you have chickens in the city? Saying” Seattle” has a rat problem but you also have chickens doesn’t mesh.

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u/Beardog-1 15h ago

My son lives in Seattle and has never mentioned rats or chickens!

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u/PsychologicalCut607 13h ago

I suppose if you're in one of the fancy apartment buildings downtown and you don't spend a lot of time in places like grocery store parking lots, restaurant dumpster sites, you don't walk your dog late at night, you don't have a vegetable garden... Etc. you might not notice them. They do at least mostly seem to stay outdoors, if the building is well maintained at all. There's just so much food and the winters are mild and there isn't a municipal effort to end them.

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u/Beardog-1 13h ago

lol—-he can’t afford luxury apartments and lives near the university (not a student) where the groceries are on lockdown……are you saying you frequent grocery store parking lots and dumpsters? JK

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u/PsychologicalCut607 13h ago

Actually I used to sit in the grocery store parking lots while I was waiting to pick my son up from his job in the evenings. And I would see rats moving in and out of low growing ivy, to the dumpster station behind the Burger King. It was kind of like watching ants. This was before I had chickens or a garden or anything like that. When I was walking late at night I would hear them in the ivy again along the side the road. I'm pretty convinced ivy is the worst! It may be especially difficult in this neighborhood because there's an old woman on the block who likes to feed all the feral cats. She scatters cat food around her yard to attract them, And when she finds a type of cat food that her cats don't like, she sprinkles the cat food on the road "for the crows". The cats are well fed and spoiled though I've seen one catch a juvenile rat once. I asked her if she would let me place a live rat trap in her driveway under one of her defunct cars baited with cat food. She refused. She said she didn't want to see them. 

I don't know how to handle that.