I currently have a six month old pup, Vigo, who is hell bent on chasing my cat. I honestly can't blame him as the cat is a "darter" and does not hold his ground in any manner.

I am following Ed's method of introducing cats and dogs to a "T" and understand it may take a long time.

Vigo can see the cat from his crate; however, he makes no noise and doesn't even seem interested in the cat at all (he is really a fantastic boy about being crated). Otherwise, baby gates keep them separated. Vigo is absolutely given no opportunities to chase the cat and is corrected when he acts overly interested on the rare occasions the cat is visable.

I am wondering if it would be beneficial to have the cat in a crate during a training session, so he cannot run away.

Otherwise I will just continue to follow Ed's protocol. Any advice or tips that have worked for you would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Melissa

My only experience is to teach the dog, "you may not look at cat". .
This worked for me with an adult pointer who did not know cats,also an adult coonhound we had for a time. Outside, all bets were off.

Assuming your goal is dog out of crate and no gates, from my experience, it is going to require lots of solid obedience work. Lots. Place. Off. Come. Touch. Leave it. Down.

I elected to not use the ecollar in this situation due to MY lack of experience at the time. I was comfortable with using the ecollar to proof for known behaviors, but hesitated in using it in situations I was unsure of. Honestly, I was afraid of causing Falcon to think the cats were causing the correction, not me, and of his possible response.

Falcon is now two years old and we are making great progress in this situation. If he is on a down or place when he sees the cats - he is very dependable. If he is up on all fours, a command (or two) of come, leave it, off, touch, etc... is enough to control the situation. I would say this has been accurate for the past five or six months.

To clarify - we also use pet gates for certain rooms to give the cats security. We learned early on, that in spite of Falcon's "big bluff" and prey drive, he would not harm the cats when/if he had the chance. This was a huge part in my decision to work on obedience/marker training for our situation.

Thank you both!

Barbara, Yes I would like to eventually have the gates down and them both be "free" in the house. Although, the cat will always have the safe spot of the laundry room because I keep a gate up to keep the dogs out of the litterbox. Right now my house looks like I have many children with 4 gates in use but that's what raising a pup is like.

I completely see your point about obedience and I do think Vigo will have to grow up and mature quite a bit before we can get past this. He sort of approaches the cat like a kangaroo on drugs. Not mean, just insanely goofy. Like Falcon, Vigo is not interested in hurting the cat and I am very sure about his intent because my older GSD (who is with my mom most of the time, but I have visitation rights lol) has a completely different attitude about cats...eek!

I think I will also start working obedience more in our basement...he definitely knows the cat is usually in the laundry room so it will be a good starting point for distraction (and it was my goal to utilize the space better for the winter anyhow).


Thanks again! This helped me to really clarify things in my mind!

Ruby will be 8 months on the 19th of this month and she goes bonkers when she sees the cats. Ours are not indoor cats, but she sees them outside the fence and when they are in the enclosed porch where they sleep at night. This summer I had her nose to nose several times with one of them, but would never have trusted her off-leash. I think she could hurt one if she caught it and she is damn fast. I don't think that's necessarily what's on her mind, but it could happen - SOOOO - my husband purchased an e-collar. He used it for the first time yesterday. She gets a tone warning first (which she is used to because of the invisible fence attached to our chainlink fence) and then the mildest correction. She responded very well. After two very short corrections accompanied by the words *no kitty* she just sat and watched them. I am hopeful.....I don't expect them to be best buds - I just want her not to go bonkers when she sees them. It doesn't help that the one counted coup on her several times this summer. Also, two of the cats love dogs and have always slept curled up with my big dogs. So they don't understand why they haven't been able to cozy up to her.

That ear forward alert attention is never benign.
I've found a stern correction for looking at cat to be our only path to harmony.
Sitting transfixed in a rigid down while following the cat with your eyes doesn't do it for me. I don't want them looking at the cat, period. I don't want to be alerted about cats either.

Good advice, Betty.

My situation might be a little different since I got a kitten after I got my dogs.

My goal when I got my kitten, Mac, a year ago was to have a "happy family", where the dogs and cat were buddies, and I could trust them all together. I have a high prey drive border collie, and a high toy drive Shepherd; and hubby has a young basset hound who likes chasing little critters. We certainly had our work cut out, but we have successfully integrated Mac into our pack. I trust all of the dogs with the cat. Mac even comes outside when I go out to play with the dogs. He'll chase the dogs around, stalk us, parcour off trees and fences.

I used corrections and reward to define what was acceptable behavior for the dogs and what wasn't. We went back to tethering them, then to just them wearing a drag line, then to supervised interactions. I stayed in the supervised phase for a while; but the dogs never showed any signs of malicious intent, and the play with Mac was always gentle. Now dogs and cat hang out together. Mac likes to cuddle with my Shepherd. I allowed Mac to initiate playing with the dogs, but the dogs were not allowed to chase or pester Mac.

I used ecollar on the border collie, Brad, because she was quite obsessed with staring and chasing; but just one or two sessions and she started to mostly ignore the cat. She was allowed to look at the cat but when the intensity of her staring changed/increased, we stimmed. I would say "no" and then stim so that Brad knew I was giving the correction, not Mac. Then we redirected to toy.

Here's a short clip of Robby and Mac wrapping up their play session:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sD9UoCEqCo

Melissa, I wish you luck. Its so much fun have dogs and cats together!