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This “Wimpy” Animal May Be Better As A Guard Dog Than Guard Dogs
Survival Institute
Survival Institute

This “Wimpy” Animal May Be Better As A Guard Dog Than Guard Dogs

by
September 30, 2017

If you’ve every had a dog as a pet, you know that they bark at everything. Every squirrel. Every dog in the vicinity. Every person walking by or vehicle driving by. Everything.

It’s this tendency to be a walking alarm system aided by their senses (which are sharper than human’s senses) that makes many self-protection experts say that a dog one of the best things that you can have for the protection of your home and family. Consider this: if you have a home alarm system, that system only goes off if one of its door sensors, window sensors, or motion sensors are triggered. Frankly, this only happens when someone has actually already broken into your home. On the other hand, a dog gives you plenty of warning before the intruder even gets to your home.

So, if you’re not a dog person, it may be worth considering becoming a dog person.

But, maybe you have serious allergies to dogs or just, for whatever reason, really don’t want dogs anywhere near you. What can you do to have a great alarm system at your home?

Well, a surprising option is… geese.

Yes, geese. Maybe that sounds crazy to you (it did to me, at first) and maybe you think of geese as a “wimpy” animal, but Ashley Hetrick makes some convincing arguments for why geese can make effective guard animals. Hetrick says that geese are naturally territorial (which makes them protective of a certain geographic area such as your house and yard), have heightened hearing and sight (including better sight than either humans or dogs), are easy to keep (they prefer to graze on grass instead of you having to feed them), and are loud (if you’ve ever heard geese honk when flying, you know that this is true).

Surprisingly, though, you may not know that geese are also vicious attackers. Hetrick writes,

As flock animals, they shouldn’t be kept individually. That means that you’ll have multiple guards defending territory. Each goose is armed with a sharp serrated beak capable of inflicting significant damage. The beak, however, is the least of your worries. Goose wings are equipped with bony club -like knobs at the wrists, and once they’re within range, they begin beating their opponent with a force capable of breaking bones. Humans venturing too close to wild goose nests have had arms broken, as well as severe head trauma. These injuries from wild geese are only a sampling of the capacity of a much larger domestic goose. The biggest wild geese only grow to roughly 9 pounds, whereas domestic geese have a lot more girth behind their punch, weighing in at up to 22 pounds.

Frankly, geese can be dangerous when someone invades their territory, which is an added bonus at your bug out location as you may not want “visitors.”

So, if you don’t want dogs and you don’t want the hassle of animals that you have to take care of, geese may be a great guard option for you to consider.

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