In 2011, I wrote an article for the Small Farms Quarterly about “Livestock Guardian Dogs.” In the past nine years I gained many additional insights and had new experiences, which I want to share in this new article.
A heavy loss of lambs, caused by a desperate and mangy coyote, made me consider using a livestock guardian dog. After weighing options like a lama or a donkey, I decided to go with a dog. The US government was testing several breeds of guardian dogs at that time.
A lead person for these field trials was Dr. Jeffrey Green at the Sheep Experiment Station in Dubois, Idaho. He was kind enough to take my call and after a lengthy conversation, I was set on getting a Great Pyrenees. That was the breed that had not bitten any human during these tests of about 300 dogs of various breeds.
I was living at that time in populated New Jersey and had rented public land to graze my sheep. I needed a dog that was safe around people. I received literature about raising, training, and understanding livestock guardian dogs. Simultaneously, I contacted a breeder in Tennessee and purchased a 13-month-old female, who had been started on goats.
There are many old-world guardian dog breeds like Great Pyrenees from France, Maremmas from Italy, and Akbash and Anatolian Shepherds from Turkey, to name a few. They have several traits in common. First, they are all large.
Most often, they are of light color. Livestock, with its innate fear of the wolf, feel less threatened by a lighter colored dog versus a dark or black dog. That means white dogs are more acceptable to a group of sheep to live amongst them. Furthermore, guardian dog breeds lack prey drive, which makes them less likely to chase and hunt animals.
That keeps a guardian dog from chasing the animals it is supposed to protect, or at the very least reduces the amount greatly. Guardian dogs are by nature protective. They feel obligated to protect and defend the livestock with which they grew up. This guarding behavior is instinctive. It is not taught, and it cannot be taught. The dog either has it or it doesn’t have it, in which case it will fail.
