Someone asked what Georgie guards.
George (back) and his sister Gracie are Great Pyrenees. They’re Livestock Guardian Dogs, and they guard…
the pigs (before you ask, the pigs are not pets. Yes, we eat them. Well, WE don’t eat them all, we usually sell them to friends, family, coworkers, whoever’s interested in buying a half pig or a whole one, and keep half a pig for our own consumption. We are not vegetarians. We don’t process the pigs ourselves, we take them to a butcher to be processed.)…
..and the chickens! (But mostly the chickens. They can’t actually get into the pig yard, but they’re there to run off any predators who might come sniffing around the pigs.)
Some history – we moved our chickens out to the back forty (not really forty acres, that’s just what we call the three acre field at the back of our property) in the Fall of 2008. And then we started losing chickens, at the rate of about one a week. We discussed ways to protect the chickens. Fred was in favor of getting a donkey, but I thought dogs would be a better choice. Fred researched Great Pyr rescues, and found a few possibilities, but the problem was that first of all, they wanted $500 per dog and we couldn’t justify spending $1,000 on dogs to protect chickens that had cost $2 each. Second, none of the rescues wanted to adopt out Great Pyrs to act as livestock guardians, they were adopting them out as pets only. We happened across an ad in one of those free supermarket papers, and a week later, we brought George and Gracie home.
They were four months old, they’d been around chickens, and they were super friendly puppies. A few days after we got them, I was out in the chicken yard gathering eggs, and someone stopped by. I didn’t hear him until he approached the fence of the chicken yard, and then I was startled to see him. When I jumped and said “Oh!”, George and Gracie reacted immediately. They put themselves between me and the guy at the fence, and barked their heads off at him. It appears that we’d found our protectors.
It took a while longer for them to bond with their flock, but they did. They live out in the chicken yard with the chickens, they’re always happy to see me coming (though that might very well be because I usually have a snack for them!) and they’re very happy pups.
Climbing into my lap so he can bat at my hand and bite me seems to be just about Hutch’s favorite thing to do.
“HEY! HI! WHAT YOU DOIN’ OVER THERE?!”
Starsky, mildly floofed.
Coltrane is curious if it might be snackin’ time.
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Previously
2009: “How YOU doin’?”
2008: I swear that every time a foster cat’s stay with us draws near to a close, they get unbearably cuter and sweeter.
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.