Livestock Guardian Dogs 101

[Music] hi my name is sarah silva and welcome to greenstar farm we're out here today to talk about working dogs i have a couple different types of working dogs here on the ranch we have livestock guardian dogs and herding dogs i've been working with dogs since i was a teenager actually i've done a lot of behavioral dog training even before i was a rancher i worked with dogs and actually had a pet sitting company and dog training and dog walking company so have had many years experience with lots of different dog breeds both small and large and all different types of working classes and but today we're going to focus on livestock guardian dogs and a little bit on herding dogs and sort of the different things that would be helpful for a new person starting either with herding dogs or with livestock guardian dogs we're only going to talk about guardian dogs and herding dogs but there are also cart dogs and all and how am hunting dogs and lots of different types of dogs that i'm totally going to skip over today the the dogs for ranches the working dog the ranch dog the herding dog they're harder to come by harder to come by because often we are breeding for companion dogs in the united states and we don't have a large selection of good working dogs it was really hard for me when i first started to find finding working dogs um just to find a herding dog i would could find herding dog breeds but their parents weren't actually working so one main thing when you're looking for herding dogs and livestock guardian dogs is to make sure the parents are working make sure the grandparents are working if you can the it's really important to know what the bloodlines of your dogs are what they come from you know what kind of i mean if you can meet the dogs generally i don't let everybody meet my livestock guardian dogs but definitely if you have herding dogs definitely meet those parents if you can even if it's a virtual meet you can see a lot just by meeting the dogs a lot of herding dogs people will import from europe as well as live talk guardian dogs my life my herding dogs are mostly red healers i like the cattle dogs because i raise pigs and goats as well as sheep and chickens and i found that the cattle dogs are a little tougher with the the breeds that will turn on them the species like for example a border collie is a softer dog and they'll herd your sheep and they'll herd chickens too um but if a buck or a boar turn on them they sometimes don't know how to deal with that where a healer actually will follow the heels of those tougher animals and they'll actually go and nip at them if they need to move them they're a little more aggressive and stubborn and they'll keep moving those bigger stock you'll see sometimes when i'm walking around the ranch my healers will pick a fight with a pig just on a fence line just so that they they're always constantly making sure those pigs know that regardless of their size they are always ready to push them around and and i'm talking 900 pound pigs versus a 30 pound dog and they make sure it's there they're going to be able to do it when you're looking for your lifestyle guardian dogs it's really good to not only make sure the dogs come from working lines but also that the working lines the parents have been tested make sure they have had x-rays not just a health check at the vet but like x-rays that they have the orthopedic foundation of america certifications on their dogs then you know your investment's worthwhile you don't want to put time into these dogs and then find out you know four or five years down the line or six or seven when your dog's like perfect that he's going to or she's going to have hip dysplasia or arthritis or tendinitis and all these things that these larger breeds and any breed really can have you want to make sure that you're come you're getting your dogs from someone who knows what they're doing when it comes to breeding the dogs and have had some experience breeding dogs in general and preferably experience breeding livestock guardian dogs and raising them too be careful you know great pyrenees is a really common breed you'll see in the united states and that's because there's a lot of companion animal breeders for pyrenees so you know you'll see the great pyrenees and you won't necessarily know unless you see that the parents are working all my dogs come from working lines i have a variety of breeds most of them are not purebreds and that's because mostly what i was searching for were lines bloodlines that were a history of working with poultry because poultry dogs are actually a lot harder to come by and really a lot harder to train and that's true with your herding dog and your livestock guardian dog poultry is probably one of the most difficult things to train for because they're fluffy and they're you know they smell good they run around they do lots of very exciting things that are very exciting for a young dog so we've got a purebred marama here we have some half gps greek pyrenees half um marama my dogs that i bred are actually mostly akbash a quarter marima and a quarter great pyrenees particularly because on my ranch one thing i really wanted to do was have a short hair easy to manage coat i don't necessarily want a dog that i have to do a lot of grooming for as far as housing and all the ranch things you need to have for your dogs one one thing is really solid fences livestock guardian dogs are bred they've been bred for thousands of years to work with humans to work with the livestock to live with the livestock and they'll you know with some of these herds they'll travel miles a day um with their herds roaming you know different parts of wherever you know the herdsmen have their their sheep or goats or cattle that being said our you know small ranch of 50 acres is actually not much roaming area for these dogs and they want to make sure that the predators are gone and so a lot of these a lot of your dogs will try to leave your perimeter fences and push the predators further back especially a young dog who doesn't really know what they're doing might be um inclined to go check out what's going on next door they just don't know what the predators are so they'll they'll they'll they are very known and extremely smart dogs so they'll go over under and through things if you're not careful make sure you have a no climb fence if you can do hot wires those are even more ideal definitely setting them up as young dogs to understand their perimeters is definitely a good thing i've used the sports collars with my dogs um and and with the caveat don't do any dog training within a sports electric collar without a professional you can ruin your dog really quickly so these are the these are the collars that provide an electric stimulation or a vibration or tone or all three of the things above to teach your dog's perimeters or even with training it takes years of timing and experience with other trainers to sort of get and understand how to use those types of devices but i've used the gps perimeter fences that say the invincible fence company will put in this is a gps system that works and you sort of draw a border on your property that will define the area in which your dog's supposed to stay within the collar range it's an awesome thing for a ranch dog they work really really they work in vast ranges really all you need is your collar charged and the perimeter up and it works on a gps system but you really need a professional to help you learn how to use that a lot of my dogs work with different species at greenstar farm we raise pigs chicken both broiler and laying hens sheep and goats so i have a variety of dogs that are doing a variety of things the sheep and goats are not on this particular site today but we i'm literally training dogs right now so that i have a pack of four to run with the sheep and goats and you know my biggest predators out here are coyotes cats and humans so one thing that is also good with your livestock guardians dogs is don't introduce them to every single human you do want them to be you don't want that a dangerous dog and you don't need a dangerous dog for a livestock guardian dog but you definitely don't want them to be okay with humans i've wrestling is a really common um crime and that is the act of stealing sheep of goats and cattle off of a site and even just around the corner it's it's almost happened to us so we're definitely it's definitely something we're aware of and we don't keep our sheep and goats anywhere with at least one dog now for that reason introducing your dog to your ranch one main thing about introducing your dog to your ranch really depends on what dog you decide to choose if you don't have a lot of dog experience i really advise you going to a breeder who's has older dogs who've started older dogs and do some and spend some time on that ranch with the person and their dogs and take an older dog home you're going to pay a lot more but the reality is it's not going to be any more money than you might spend ruining a dog or all the extra time it's going to take learning how to train that dog so you know you might spend two or three thousand dollars on a good livestock guardian dog that's trained but i'll tell you it's worth the investment the investment is your time and your patience and loss of stock you you know you you might you might uh lose chickens when you just first introduce your dogs to chickens if you have no experience with chickens even with experience of chickens your puppies will play and if you're not looking you're going to lose chicken you know they they and they play in a different way a good poultry dog might grab your chicken and lick it to death but a bad poultry dog grabs the chicken and kills it immediately so there is a difference but with herding dogs it's the same way i actually start all my herding dogs on poultry i start them on broilers because broilers don't move very fast broiler is a meat chicken they don't fly like a laying hen they're mostly on the ground they're slow they're they sort of have to be confined because they're more vulnerable and my herding dogs actually learn how to move chickens before they learn how to move anything else and that's uh my first herding dog actually was the main purpose was to move chickens in the coop at night because uh and and to find the ones that were roosting i taught my herding dog i taught my taught my herding dogs to move the chickens to find the chickens when they're out i've also taught my herding dogs to find baby animals like often when in the spring we have lambs and goat kids and they'll be sleeping in long grass and we can't find them so i bring out my main stock dog and he will go and search the pasture for babies and it is a time saver and and worth every penny putting that time in there for them because um boy a missing baby that's a loss of stock sometimes they don't get out they they won't make it through the night when working with your livestock guardian dogs some things that are really important one you when you get your dog from your breeder make sure that the dog was born outside or in a barn or somewhere with stock so that that smell is imprinted on the animals it's really important that your dog wants to stay with its stock and so from as early on you can possibly do keep your dog with or near stock so if you have older dogs definitely a pair of working dogs that are good keep your puppy with them with the stock until usually until they're teenagers and then once they start becoming i guess roughly eight to ten months every dog is a little different they'll get a little playful that's when you might have to use things like tethers or fencing them in inside with the stock a lot of people will do that a lot of there's a lot of different options there's a really good facebook group it's working livestock dogs livestock guardian dogs on facebook it's a group i subscribe to i've learned so much there are a lot of people who have 10 20 30 years of experience with these dogs and they've pretty much seen it all and they can help you sort of sort out those little intricacies that would you know might happen on your farm when introducing an older dog to your stock if you like bring in a three or four year old dog you don't just let your dog go in with the stock herding dog anything make sure you have some control and what's really important is to make sure your dog always thinks you have control regardless of whether or not you actually have control it's all about the attitude right so i employ a lot of these tethers like this is a a 10 foot tether this will keep my big dogs um from running after the stock sometimes i'll put a drag on it so that and a drag is just something heavy on one side so that the dog is limited in how fast they can run because sometimes you'll have a teenage dog that wants to run with the sheep as they run across the pasture but you want to sort of discourage that kind of behavior you don't want your dog playing with the stock they really those are their charges they can play with the other livestock guardian dogs but that's about all you want a good livestock guardian dog pretty much just sits around most of the day and that's that's what you want to encourage um another option is like a 30 foot cable and the reason this is nice is when you're introducing your dog to stock you put this on their their on a pull chain always use pool chains because then the correction comes from the dog the dog's energy is what corrects it you're not actually the one correcting it and you can like you can you can put this on the ground and step on it so that your dog can't run when you want to stop them another technique is as with a 30-foot lead they don't always know you're attached to it so that's why it's really nice you can hold on to it they can be running around and doing things but you can still grab that dog if they decide to run or play just be too active around the stock which is what you don't want um when my uh often it's really good to keep these the dogs when when there's certain times of the day when they tend to be more playful like early morning and late afternoon usually when it's cooler i'll put my dogs on a tether these ones you have to be careful to make sure you get a really strong tether because if you get something that the dog learns it can chew through or it can bust it will start doing that these dogs are smarter than your normal companion dogs and they've been bred that way so you want to make sure you get a really this cable is made for a 200 pound dog and um the things that have broken on these are the clasps so they still have managed the big dogs still have managed to break these things so you just want to make sure you sort of get ahead of any problems before they start happening another thing with these dogs is they're super super super sensitive so anything you can do with even your herding dogs is make sure to avoid bad behavior try to you know set them up for success and that's true with all of your dogs but really with these dogs if you go and start trying to yell at them when they're out playing with stock or yell at them for touching something they're not supposed to touch or for going out to the gate they're just going to not like you and not trust you and it's really important with these dogs because of the kind how the intelligent levels that you you try never to shame them for doing something but rather try to always reward them and do things that will encourage the good behavior you know don't let a teenage dog out with young stock that's going to run around and play if you don't have something another dog in there to correct it you know it's i i set things up in such a way where i just use electric fences so that my stocks always my dogs are always near stock they don't have to be right in next to them to understand it once they're older and they've chilled out then they can do that and they stop you know have the puppy zoomies the puppy zoomies can be your worst nightmare when they're working with stock picking the right dog for your ranch is really important or dogs uh often dogs work better in pairs um this is she this is shelby she's a purebred maremma sheepdog and so and and i chose her actually she chose me because a neighbor had her and she was working by herself and she didn't have help so she barked a lot we brought her out here and paired her up with a couple of our other dogs and hunter come here buddy come here baby thank you and hunter is uh one of the dogs that were born here he's mostly akbash his papa's half maremma and you know the grandma's a really sweet dog but also fierce shelby is one of my most fierce dogs um except she's also one of our sweetest dogs so it's really important one thing that's right even if you have if you have depending on how much space you're trying to protect small acreage three acres if you're just trying to keep let's say raccoons out of your strawberry field you probably just need one ranch dog one lifethought guardian dog you might even be able to do that with a herding dog like an australian shepherd might be a good mix for that but the livestock guardian dogs are nice because they're really good at staying outside they have a really nice thick coat and um they uh they're really they're really good at making sure that home is protected there's um if you have much more than let's say let's say five acres or more really one dog is good two dogs is better one dog has a lot of responsibility even if it's just five acres or six acres right now we're looking at a three acre spot i have two dogs in it with a thousand chickens i have dogs spread out over the 50 acres pretty much one every three to four acres and they're all bordering each other so it really feels like there's a lot more and that's really because a dog by themselves will hang back with the stock and bark away the predators this is really the best predator-friendly form of farming you can have because the idea isn't to kill the idea isn't to kill the uh predators but to to just defend the area and keep them away so hunter is actually a 20 month old life thought guardian dog he's not quite finished but he's really close to being finished and we have both his parents working on site his father's out with livestock with the sheep and goats right now and his mom's out near the house with poultry um we if you're in say we're in cougar country we actually had a cougar a few years ago jump our fences which are pretty tall and steal a 40 pound plus pig that was the last year i had no livestock guardian dogs so that was probably what six years ago now that um we had no dogs on we had we had herding dogs but no lifestyle guardian dogs so if you have cougars or bears you have big predators you better have two or three dogs um you want to make sure your dogs are safe and the best way to make sure your dogs are safe and comfortable is having a a group of dogs because dogs are pack animals they work better you're going to have one dog that hang one or two dogs to hang back with the livestock and then you've got your perimeter dogs that'll run towards them these guys really want to stay in my face as far as the breeds i'm there are bigger breeds there are breeds like the the kangal and the oh it's called cass it's caucasian oh i can't remember the name those two dogs are tougher dogs better for people get those dogs four or five in a pack um to work in like wolf and bear country to keep the the livestock safe the problem with those dogs is um although i still do one day want to try to get a kangal dog out here is they tend to roam more and a lot of the breeds that we have here the off bosch the marimbas they're right in your face all of the time and they're not as much of a roaming i'm try you know really trying to keep the lifestyle guardian dogs have a tendency to want to move around shelby she's a marama and some things about introducing your lifestyle guardian dogs that are really important if you have an existing livestock guardian dog and you're bringing in a new dog one really important thing is to try to make sure your new your old dog is on neutral ground when you bring in your old your new dog so your old dog it's not wise to say have your old dog with a stock and then bring in a new dog because they're going to naturally want to defend the stock so shelby here is my most aggressive dog i can't actually keep her with a lot of other dogs she's not allowed to be with any of the stock dogs because um we never really know when she's gonna get mad she will actually grab a chicken and sit over it to protect them from any dog and she takes her job a little too seriously sometimes so when i introduced her to hunter just two weeks ago i actually took her on the clear 50 acres away way far away from her stock and let him run out on a leash and then let them join up and then they came together back here i walked them back together it's a safer way because you don't you don't want your dogs hurt and and you know you also want to set their relationship up for success and that's your best way to do that [Music] for pausing uh one thing with your livestock guardian dogs you want to uh take caution with is you know what kind of hair do you want on your dog if you're gonna be in a climate where there's lots of snow you might want something like a nice long coat like a great pyrenees coat or the maremma has a really nice coat but remember if you've got fox tails or you have those little burs and all the cockleburs and all those awful things you're gonna be cleaning those out in the summertime a good a good well-bred lifestyle guardian dog will have a coat that cleans out really well and sheds out really well but some dogs don't we have a great pyrenees that's fixed she's half great pyrenees she has an aquacoat it's a it's a constant battle you don't want to shave your livestock guardian dogs they have a really special coat they've got double coats it insulates them in the summer and in the winter so it's really important to keep the coats just brushed i do let my dog swim in the summertime if it's really hot they always have a trough something they can step into because these dogs get hot but they'll also dig themselves nice holes in the summertime to keep themselves cool so you'll have in every pasture there's some kind of a nice deep summer hole that the dogs will um dig for themselves hey enough so this is a yoke ragnar has on it so he doesn't go under fences keeps him from even if he's successful at digging he never is successful getting out so it stops them from you know that bad behavior there's um sometimes there's predators on the east side of the property and that the dogs want to go get rid of them and so they will try to leave the pasture and go you know push the raccoon away or skunk a couple nights ago it was a skunk we're all really sure of that come here come here so one other very clever thing is what's called a jump gate these are for livestock guardian dogs you can look and search jump gate online for these but i think there's something like 15 inches your sheep and goats won't get out of this but your lifestyle guardian dogs can so the cool so you could use this a couple applications would be if you wanted to put their food in one area where the stock couldn't get to it so you can make like a little enclosure so the dog can get in and out but the livestock can't um your uh another application is when i first started with lifestyle guardian dogs we had you know 50 acres and only two dogs so we needed to be able to let the dogs get in and out of pastures um to protect the other livestock that were in other pastures so we we did these and we taught our dogs to go through them by sending the children through these gates and the dogs followed because it was hard at first to teach our dogs and so that's how we actually did it treating them works sometimes only three of my dogs know how to go through these now because i have enough dogs that i actually keep them uh in their pastures with their animals now but this is a really awesome tool for for excluding animals to from the dogs the dogs have a break because often some dogs won't even eat around their livestock because they're afraid to that like the chickens will eat their their food for example we use buckets to feed our dogs so that the dog's head can stay in the bucket safely without the chickens trying to eat their food so this is this is just a really cool tool for livestock guardian dogs [Music] you

Channel: CAFFflix

Views: 37,164

Rating: 4.9297218 out of 5

Keywords: livestock guardian dogs, lgds, ranching, poultry, smallfarms, dogs

Id: jUM9d7QoUnE

Length: 27min 32sec (1652 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021