How can I stop the puppy barking at my chickens?

[ChickensGoMeh]

He just runs around and around their enclosure, doing this head wrecking monotonous 'ruff, ruff, ruff, ruff'. Tail wagging, so clearly having a brilliant time. The hens completely ignore him at this stage and carry on pottering, but Christ on a bike he is doing my head in. At the moment, I am calling him in and making him get in his crate when he does it in the vain hope that he'll associate yelling his floppy eared head off with being made to stay quiet in his bed. But really I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Any advice before I tie his jaws together?

Take him out and start doing a little training session with him as close to the chooks as you can get without him going nutty. Day by day, get closer to them until you can train and he listens right by them. Five minute sessions would be enough to start with.

They only way to fix it is to put in the work - it will only get worse otherwise. He is very unlikely to associate being the crate with the chickens; he's more likely to associate coming to his name with being put to bed and that's not good.

If he's out there barking, go and get him and bring him in. Take a lead if he is going to try not coming with you. Once you get to him and he's mid bark, give him a stern no and bring him in. Really don't ever call him to you for a punishment/bollocking/irritated owner session; it will go wrong!

Ah, thanks daisy. I sort of knew I wasn't doing something right, but couldn't work out what. It's the oddest thing, because when he's near the birds on his lead (I take him out on lead when I muck out and tether his lead a short distance away, so he can see me and hopefully get used to the birds pottering about) he doesn't show any interest. He used to pull on his lead, leap about, yelp with 'I want to eeeeeeat them' longing, but he now just sits there calmly watching me, lead slack. But once he's off lead, running laps around the coop and yelling become the only entertainment in town

Brilliant sign.

He will learn quite easily I expect. If you've already got to the stage of calm disinterest while he's on lead; it won't take too long for him to get the other bit, so that eventually dog and chooks could wander round together taking not a blind bit of notice of each other.

Actually. The dog will probably be more interested in eating the chicken poo. Ours love it. Love it. We have a quite a lot of chickens.