Why livestock protection dogs?
We have also heard amazing stories of livestock protection dogs protecting and saving young stock from harm. Good working dogs are acutely aware of the vulnerability of babies and sick animals. Some dogs will bark whenever a ewe begins to lamb, for instance, alerting the owners. That is exceptional behaviour, but incredible that it happens at all. A number of stock owners are successfully using llamas and donkeys to guard their sheep flocks. For a while there were many people selling and buying llamas for this purpose, before they realized that only certain llamas were able to do the job, and only in certain conditions. Llamas cannot stand up to bears and mountain lions or to wolf, coyote and dog packs. Neither could any one protection dog. The advantage of a dog is that he can bark to alert the owner; he can harass a bear or lion and intimidate some of them into leaving, or make it more difficult for the predator to kill one of the animals. The livestock protection dog in particular,
