Canis lupus hominis

The game bird's best friend.

I came across this interesting text in E. A. Quarles’s American Pheasant Breeding and Shooting (1916). This book includes practical advice from several pheasant breeding operations in the United States.  The most interesting part I have encountered in my perusal of the text is the discussion on how to control vermin and predators, which, for a pheasant breeding operation, is always a major concern.

Grain attracts rats, which spread disease, contaminate feed, and kill poults. Foxes, hawks, crows, jays, mink, raccoons, skunks, and owls also take their toll as predators.

In the early days of game bird propagation in this country, it was a common practice for people blast predatory birds. Of course, hawks and owls are now protected by federal law, but it doesn’t stop some people from shooting them to protect game birds.

However, the most interesting part of the section is on which domestic animals a game bird producer should keep to control vermin and predators.

Cats are very strongly rejected, for they are just as much a problem for pheasants as rats are:

Even if you do not keep a cat, you will be surprised at the number of these highly destructive creatures roaming the countryside in search of prey if you set out a few cat traps. An ordinary rabbit trap made a little larger than usual will do. The Greenwich, Connecticut, Bird Protective Society sells a most effective box trap for cats at $3.50. In its literature it suggests a fish head or raw meat as bait and advises placing the trap in shrubbery or having it otherwise partly concealed. The David T. Abercrombie Co., 311 Broadway, New York City, carries a box trap that automatically chloroforms the cat.

Keep no cat yourself. They do not destroy birds as a rule when anyone is looking and the hour following daybreak is their favorite time for hunting, so the oft-repeated statement, “but my cat doesn’t kill birds,” is seldom based on full knowledge of the animal’s movements. Cats have been proved by medical authorities to be carriers of the germs of scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis and many other frightful diseases. See “The Cat and Transmission of Disease,” by Dr. C. A. Osborne, Biological Department, Clark University, Worcester, Mass.

In common with practically all other vermin, cats are most destructive during the breeding season, when it is impossible or unwise to confine the young in covered pens (pg. 48).

Instead of keeping a cat to control vermin, an Airedale can do the job far better, and unlike a cat,  it can be trained to leave pheasants alone.

A Mr. Wallace Evans of St. Charles, Illinois, recommends the Airedale and the ferret as the best choice for controlling rats:

“I find it a hard battle to keep down the rats on my farm. Where there is so much feed around for them, it means one continuous fight from year end to year end to keep them within bounds. I have a number of Airedale dogs trained especially for this purpose, and also keep several ferrets; with the additional aid of steel traps and various forms of automatic traps and various kinds of poisons, I am just able to hold my own against them and prevent them from doing any serious damage. No one method alone is effective where rats are necessarily so numerous; every possible scheme should be tried and a continuous fight kept up if you want to keep them under control” (pg.52).

The book also recommends that the Airedale also be used against cats and skunks, and when one breeder’s Airedale kills a pheasant, she is easily corrected.

A well-trained Airedale is indeed a valuable asset to a game farm. Mr. Harry T. Rogers’ splendid dog, “Liz” is of this breed. She hunts his rearing fields day and night for vermin and woe to the cat, skunk or rat that she gets within striking distance of. As a young dog, “Liz” killed a cock pheasant. Seizing the bird by the legs, Mr. Rogers struck her with it a few times, and from that day this splendidly intelligent dog has never harmed a bird (pg 52).

If you hit a cat with a dead bird, I don’t think it would stay around all that long.

Dogs are much better at controlling vermin than cats are. They can be trained to leave certain species alone, and if they are large dogs, as these Airedales are, they can go after more vermin besides rodents. And they can also be used to hunt pheasants, which is in keeping with their well-deserved notoriety as perhaps the most versatile hunting dog breed– at least among breeds originating in the British Isles.

There’s a certain romance that cats keep down the mice and never kill the birds. In reality, they kill lots of birds and wildlife, even species that one would never want killed.

In a game bird breeding operation, there would always be too many problems with feral and stray cats to justify keeping a cat solely for the purpose of controlling vermin.

In the context of one of these operations, a cat would itself be vermin.

It would be like keeping a leopard to control the numbers of coyotes around a sheep farm.

A leopard would keep the coyotes down, but it also would probably take a sheep or two– or twenty.