In about 1975, several researchers from the northeastern U.S. began researching and promoting guard dogs for the protection of sheep. I am ignorant as to whether or not guard dogs were used in the U.S. before 1975. I do know they have been used for thousands of years in Europe and Asia. There are several breeds of guard dogs advertised in sheep! My expertise with guard dogs is very limited so I will stick with what I know.

Good Dog, Bad Dog

I know that trained and properly maintained guard dogs are excellent at keeping predators from eating sheep. Each breed, and for that matter, individual dogs, have advantages and disadvantages over others, so a flockmaster needs to experiment and try various breeds out before getting discouraged if there is bad experience with one breed or individual.

A Great Pyrenees dog on duty on a Wyoming lamb pasture. Guard dogs can provide only so much protection on a 20-square-mile lamb pasture. Given enough time, coyotes will figure the dogs out.

When I became acquainted with guard dogs about 1982, many Colorado producers had been working with them for three to five years, with mixed results.

One friend of mine related a story about two guard dogs he had, both males. After the dogs had been with his ewes for a few months, he noticed that the ewes would get very nervous when the dogs got close. He decided to keep an eye on the dogs. One afternoon when he got back from town, he went behind his buildings to check his ewes and caught the dogs molesting a ewe. One dog would hold the ewe, while the other one sodomized it. He was highly positive about guard dogs but managed to sell this pair and replace them with dogs having a more benign orientation. [This is not a rare phenomenon; we've received other such reports from across the U.S., and one report that castration solved the problem.-Ed.]

Before trusting your ewes to them, be sure that your guard dogs aren't nasty with ewes. Guard dogs are individuals; some may not be doing the right job for you! If a dog doesn't work, try a different dog or breed.

Animal Magnetism

One of my friends had two dogs that were very aggressive towards strange people. On one occasion when the sheep and dogs were in the high country, two hippie-type hikers came through the flock. The dogs ripped their clothes off, leaving them bare in God's great amphitheater. They, of course, were not pleased and complained to the local Forest Service office and to the sheriff. These agency folks-along with the recently undressed hippies-visited my friend with their tale of woe. My friend's reply was, "What did you do to make my dogs so upset, you must smell like coyotes or were messing with my sheep!"

The dogs repeated this disrobing on several more hikers in the following months. When I met the dogs, they were being transported back East by the researcher. He asked me if I wanted to see them. As I approached his station wagon and the dogs, the dogs came alive in their cages, danced around, tongues out, tails wagging, and looking happy. The researcher couldn't believe it.

"Man, these dogs look like they know you and that you are a long-lost friend! Mind if I take them out so they can get closer to you?" he asked.

"No, I'd like to see them outside the cages," I replied.

"These are the dogs that rip people's clothes off," he cautioned.

"Do I look like a hippie?" I asked.

I believe the dogs were Great Pyrenees. They jumped out of the truck and ran over to me like they were my best buddies with all the doggie joy signs on flag.

"Well, I never saw them do that before," the researcher remarked.

I scratched their foreheads and petted them.

"Vicious dogs, clearly unfit for duty around hippies," I remarked.

"Wonder why they like you so well?" the researcher asked.

A guard dog near a dead lamb. We believed the lamb to have died from eating a poison plant. The dog we worked with ate these dead lambs and refused dog food. That was not a good plan; it is best to get them trained to eat dog food.

"I have that kind of affect on big dogs and red-headed women," was my reply. How would I know?

Well, I really did know. In 1980, I started testing the chemicals that Dr. Roy Teranishi, a USDA chemist, was isolating from coyote urine. Roy formulated these chemicals in lard, vegetable oil, and lanolin, and I used them as coyote trapping lures and M-44 baits. It was impossible to keep the chemicals off of me, my clothes, and things I touched. The stuff penetrated my skin and deposited in my fat. Dogs and coyotes can smell that even when humans cannot. One of the chemicals was the active estrus pheromone that the female coyote puts out when it is ready to mate.

After I started working with Teranishi's lures, big dogs viewed me amorously as a friend. The bigger and more aggressive dogs took a sniff of me, and we were fast friends. Small, yappy dogs were scared to death of me and would shiver, hide, and bark like there was an emergency. It took years to metabolize that stuff out of my system so big dogs had a more benign attitude about me.

Now some of you machos are wondering whether or not the pheromones Roy isolated from coyotes improved my attractiveness to women. Couldn't really tell; the chemicals did not impress my wife. Looking at me, it would take more than pheromones to ring up a favorable attractiveness score. I'm not Brad Pitt.

Dogs Enjoy Eating Dead Lambs

In 1985, I had a coyote control contract north of Fort Collins, just inside the Wyoming border. Sam Matsuda and Tommy Thompson were running about 6,000 head of lambs on about 20 square miles of foothills short-grass prairie. We had been doing the coyote work for them for about four years, keeping a full-time trapper on the place from two weeks before the lambs got there until they were pulled out the first week of September. We checked every dead lamb for cause of death. When a coyote kill occurred, our average time to get the coyote was five days. In addition, we had various control methods going at all times. Snares, and calling and shooting were used most. Before 1985, we kept the losses to predators under 1%.

Sam bought two guard dogs (Great Pyrenees), trained them according to instructions, brought them up, and turned them out with the lambs. For us, that meant that we had to be careful with what we used for coyote control so we did not kill or injure the dogs. We relied on denning, calling, and snares. We caught the dogs several times in snares. They would lie down and wait for us to come by and release them.

The dogs did not like dog food and for long stretches of time would not eat any of it. My son was the trapper and would report to me weekly about the dogs and the predation situation.

"Hey Dad, the dogs are eating dead lambs," he reported.

"Are they killing the lambs?" I asked.

"No, I don't think so, they have eaten several that I have checked out that I think were lightning kills," he said.

"Keep an eye on them. Are they eating dog food when there are no dead lambs?" I asked.

"No, they come into camp only once in a great while, get a drink, hang around for a pat on the head, then head back out," he reported.

"Are you finding any coyote kills?" I asked.

"No, but the dogs could be cleaning them up. I have caught or shot about 20 coyotes so far."

About a month later, he reported that he suspected that the dogs were killing and eating lambs, but he could never catch them in the act. We reported that to Sam who decided to leave the dogs there. He wanted us to watch them closer.

When a dead lamb is found, it is very important that the cause of death is determined accurately. If it isn't, lots of time and money can be spent chasing ghosts.

The summer was about over, and we never did catch the dogs killing lambs, though we knew they were eating dead lambs.

When the lambs were loaded on the trucks in September, the count was 300 short. We knew that coyotes did not kill 300 lambs. We were not sure how many the dogs killed, if any. Several months later, I caught a suspicious trespasser in the pasture whose vehicle had been reported pulling out of the pasture with a large trailer sometime in mid-summer. He was a deputy sheriff who was later fired for misconduct.

The guard dogs ended up dead. One was shot by a neighbor. The other was brought home, but disappeared, returning to the lamb pasture. Nobody ever saw it after a brief sighting on the ranch.

Several weeks later, a friend and I caught an Australian cow dog attacking a small group of lambs that had been overlooked at the September roundup.

As usual, lambicide is a tough mystery to solve. Were the lambs stolen, or were they killed and eaten by coyotes, guard dogs, or free-ranging neighborhood dogs? We never determined that.

The next season, we had no guard dogs, did our usual things, and the losses were under 1%.

Text & Illustrations ©2005 by Major L. Boddicker. Dr. Boddicker is in demand worldwide as the foremost authority on predator control techniques for the protection of livestock, endangered species, and human populations. He is the top private wildlife-damage control agent throughout the Great Plains states of the U.S. For more information contact Rocky Mountain Wildlife Products, 877-484-2768 or online at critrcall.com