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Welcome Back!

I’ve got a cool show for you today, tons of questions that followed up my last episode, so I thought I’d ask the audience for more questions, and man did I get em… I was honestly kind of shocked at how big of a response this got! Before I get into answering these questions though I really want to make sure I am really clear here. I’m going to be giving you my opinion, and my perspective based on my experiences, my lifestyle, climate, and the research I’ve done. By no means do I consider myself an expert, but you guys asked me, so I’ll tell ya what I think and remember you get what you pay for and this podcast is free. I suggest you use common sense, do some of your own research, consult your vet, and make your own determinations on whether or not the information I’m giving is right for you and your animal. With that said, here are my thoughts and opinions.

First off, let me say right away that this is nowhere nearly comprehensive. I’ll do my best to answer these questions but for some of these concepts, there’s nothing as good as seeing the training and behavior with your own eyes. That’s why I’m working on a couple dog training videos for you guys. I’ll be doing one specifically on training Livestock Guardian Dogs, and another on training a Homestead Family Dog, a pet. The methods are different, the training goals are very different, and the lifestyle of the animal is very different. I hope to show you how I train LGDs this year because I’m hoping my dog will come into heat soon so I can get her bred. If that all works out, there may even be puppies up for sale late winter or early spring of 2017 but we’ll just have to wait and see.

I want to preface all of these answers with one very important thing that everyone needs to realize, no matter the purpose of the dog, It is not a human. I’m going to repeat that… Animated movies depicting animals with human characteristics, emotions, thoughts, and minds have done the world a huge disservice. Animals are not humans! They think and feel differently, they experience life differently, and they speak different languages. Never forget that a dog is a dog, and it needs to act like a dog to be happy and fulfilled. A dog that is treated like a child will not be a happy, confident, content animal.

So let’s get into the first questions.

“How does LGD training differ from conventional dog training?” – Michael

Stephen – also asks me for “how to train 101” because he’s getting a dog this summer and doesn’t know anything about training.

I figured I’d put those two questions together since they kind of fit. Then answer the first more in depth.

The difference is that a pet dog has a very different job and family or pack than a livestock guardian dog. A pet dog bonds to you and your family, and a livestock guardian needs to bond to the animals it protects. It’s my belief that a well trained dog can quickly and easily be ruined by an untrained person. But that a well trained person can turn a sorry mutt into a fantastic dog. So first and foremost you need to understand dog behavior, body language, and psychology. You need to understand how that dog thinks to be able to train it effectively. Because to be a good trainer, you need to be able to outsmart and think ahead of the object of your training. If you’re training a pet dog, there’s nobody I know who I trust more with dog training than Cesar Millan. That guy understands dogs and how to train them like nobody else I’ve ever seen. So if you are looking for the best education I know of, check him out. Spending $200 on learning how to train a dog will pay off immediately. If you can’t afford $200 to learn how to train your dog, you can’t afford to have a dog. So learn the skill first, then get a dog. A hospital visit for a dog bite is way more expensive than learning how to keep the dog from biting in the first place.

Training Guardian Dogs

So now let’s talk about guardian dogs a little and how you train those. I have a feeling this is going to be a multi part series because man, there’s just no way I can cover all the dozens of questions I’ve gotten on this both in email and on facebook, so we’re just going to do as much as we can in this episode and then record some more in a future episode.

A good guardian dog is going to be alert, intelligent, bonded to it’s stock and confident. It should alert to predators, warn them off and if necessary, attack the predator. It should be aware and attentive of it’s stock whether it’s goats, sheep, cattle, birds or any other livestock. So that’s kind of the picture, the mental image of what this dog acts like and how it behaves. It should be somewhat aloof of people and not too interested in getting petted or being your puppy. It has a job to do and you are the food person.

Some people disagree with what I’m about to tell you, and some people are even more extreme than me in the socialization of an LGD. I’m kind of moderate on this and I think if you can maintain some professionalism that the way I handle training is probably the best route for most people, especially on smaller acreages, or the homestead sized piece of land. If you’re working with hundreds or thousands of acres of rangeland or pasture and hundreds of animals then this isn’t exactly going to be the best thing for you in my opinion. But I’m going to answer it based on like I said earlier, my experience and lifestyle.

When the puppies are born, they are probably going to be in a whelping pen, protected from the livestock, where the female can get to the puppies to feed and care for them, as they get older they will be introduced to the livestock on the other side of the fence. At this stage of their development, they shouldn’t be kept with large or aggressive stock, we don’t want the pups to learn to be fearful of the stock, but rather to think of them as part of the family, or pack. So from about 3 weeks old to 12 weeks, you should have limited interaction with the puppy or puppies. You should pat the pups on the head, or pick up their paws, or inspect them. When you approach them, you can roll them over on their backs and mess with their paws, and look at their ears, that sort of thing, but don’t baby talk them, don’t be excitable, you need to be stony, cold, and clinical. Be confident and in control. Don’t be mean, or stern, just be conversational. Let them inspect you and sniff you. You are trying to let them know that you are the one who brings food and looks at their feet and their ears. This will help later in the dog’s life when you need to treat wounds or administer medications. You don’t want a dog that is too skiddish that they won’t let you handle them at all. Some dogs will naturally be more aloof, and others will want to love on you like crazy, push away the ones who love on you and try to coax the aloof ones a little more.

Slight aside here…

Some of you tender-hearted people are probably thinking this is cold-hearted and cruel to treat puppies like this. That’s why I said remember that they are dogs, not people. This kind of treatment is what they would get from one of their parents or a pack leader. It’s not unkind, it’s what a leader does. You aren’t their friend, you are the leader, the owner, and the commander. They have a job to do and it’s not to make you feel all warm and gooey inside. You can still be friendly but keep it professional. You’re learning how to train a working dog. That’s the key word: WORKING. I want you to think about, visualize a seeing eye dog; when a visually impaired person is walking along holding onto the dog’s harness, what’s happening? Is that dog miserable? Do you feel sorry for that dog? Do you think, “oh that poor dog”? Or what about a search and rescue dog? When they are working, do people stop and love on them, pet them, scratch and play with them? Do you think they receive special training to achieve that level of mastery? Police K-9 dogs, are they miserable poor creatures or are they dare I say it, dogs? They’re dogs, doing what a dog likes to do, it has a purpose, it has it’s needs met, it is fulfilled. That’s what we are looking to create here and the way we achieve that is to create a bond between the dog and it’s charge, the livestock. We want that puppy to grow up being comforted and finding it’s family in it’s other canine companions and the livestock it guards. Not you as the handler. Your job is to have the dog focused and always on duty. The way we do that is to start with the foundation!

Back to Training

So the puppy is getting checked on several times a day to make sure everything is ok, the puppy is now weaned, has a separate area it can escape to, you can set a piece of plywood up on blocks where the livestock can’t get to, giving the puppy a safe place to retreat, and maybe a place to sleep past that with it’s food bowl. But leave the only water source where it has to interact with the sheep or goats. What we are doing is desensitizing the dog and the stock to each other. If they always see each other every day, they mingle, nothing bad happens, no negative associations happen, then all is well. If you find that one of the stock is acting aggressively, rotate it out and replace it with a more passive, calm animal. Keep the emphasis on the dog-stock connection, not the dog-person connection. There is time later on to condition the dog to accept you, but now is the bonding process and the most important part of the training, everything else is super easy if you get this right.

Some breeders will keep 4 week old pups with young bottle fed lambs, let them sleep together and spend all their time together. This physical contact and close proximity will really help solidify a bond and set the dog up for very strong ties later in puppyhood. Most breeders will separate littermates completely at 7 to 8 weeks old forcing the puppy to bond even tighter to the stock.

I think it’s a good idea to have a couple pups nearby, but separated by more than 1 fence so they can see and smell each other but not touch. It keeps them focused on the livestock but every morning, you can let them into a separate pen to play and run around to get rid of excess energy, let them play and mock fight while you take care of the stock, then separate them back into their pens, and at this time would be a great time to teach them to go to a crate. Crate training I think can be very valuable to livestock guardians as well as pets, but in this case if they are trained to a crate from puppyhood, then if you ever need to transport or medicate the dog, it’s easy to get them to go into a crate as an adult if it’s been a normal thing their whole life.

After about 12 weeks of age the bonding is mostly done, but the puppy still shouldn’t be left alone with a whole herd or flock. Ideally it would be released to live with an older LGD to learn the ropes and grow up with the older dog to teach it. I think it’s best to have at least 2 LGDs if you have the space for them. The reason is that if there is a pack of coyotes or wild dogs, then two can fight much more efficiently than a single dog can. I will be moving towards a pair of dogs for my property as soon as we finish all the perimeter fencing and have the whole 10 acres fenced. If you have a flock of over a hundred animals, or are fencing in areas of 20-30 acres at a time, then it would be a good idea to step up to 3 or 4 trained dogs. They will space themselves out and almost disappear for most of the day, but during the twilight hours and at night they will patrol and be on alert for predators.

No More Chicken Murders Please!

A couple people have asked about training them to leave chickens alone, and to not kill birds. Well I’ll just tell you what I do with puppies, and what I’ve done with an almost year old pup. When it’s still a puppy, again, letting the animals interact really helps, keep a very light flexible switch on hand to tap the pup as a correction. You are not injuring or really even causing any pain, that’s why I say flexible. It should bend really easy and not weigh much at all. If the puppy pounces or mouths the bird, make a sharp shushing noise right as you tap the dog on the side or the snout, it will startle the puppy and break the attention long enough for you to say firmly but not loudly, “no, leave it” then pretend to ignore the dog. You may need to do this several times before the puppy decides there are more fun things to do. Then remove the bird, and go on about your day.

This brings up an important point that I think a lot of people are confused by or just gloss over. Lots of people have the definition of “training” confused with “hitting”, “punishment”, or “discipline”. You can train a slime mold. You can’t punish a slime mold. Training is repetitious activity until the mind automatically complies. It’s reinforcing a belief that a certain action or boundary is immutable and irreversible. To train a goat to not destroy your fences, you use something like electrified wire, it doesn’t harm the animal but it’s uncomfortable to touch, so they stop touching the fence and if trained well, will avoid touching anything that even looks like an electric wire. It works with dogs and people the same way. A dog will avoid touching or challenging an electric fence after only a couple shocks. I know I avoid touching my electric fence, it’s annoying and uncomfortable but it doesn’t harm me, but I sure as heck stand on my tiptoes if I have to hop across the fence.

The Lightning Bird Story

Which brings me to the way I trained my first Anatolian Shepherd Audie to not kill chickens. See, I bought her before I had a good fence, so she stayed at my fiancés family’s homestead. They had chickens, she caught chickens, so did her brother, they killed chickens, they tried hitting her with a dead chicken, that didn’t work, they tried tying a dead chicken to her collar, that didn’t work… So when I got her home to my property inside a nice big paddock, we started training. The training preparation took a couple weeks, and the real training took two minutes. Afterwards she never messed with another chicken again.

We borrowed a good electric collar, a high priced one with a good long distance transmitter, it had long prongs to get through her thick neck fur. I put it on her without charging it. Oh, and let me interject here, I strapped it to my bare leg and used it on every setting on myself before ever using it on her because I said if I’m willing to do it to her I’d better know what it’s like. It was awful on the maximum setting but after I let go of the button it was over and I was laughing cause it was over. So if you are listening to this and get upset, don’t even bother emailing me saying how awful I am for using it on her, I have a special folder for emails like that, the trash. Back to my story…

She wore it for 3 days. I took it off for the night, then put it back on her. Then a day later I took it off for a day. Then I put it back on her at night, but took it off in the morning, then kept switching things up on her. Then I left it on for a whole week, then took it off and charged it. Then kept it turned off for a couple days to see if it would hold it’s charge, it did. Every time I saw her I would fiddle with it, turn it off and on and so forth. Never once did I make it beep, never once did I use it to shock her. In her mind this thing is just a thing the human put on me. Nothing more…. I say all this to drive home the point that you MUST not let the dog know what is about to happen or else the dog will only behave if they are wearing the collar. That is not what you want! And now we get to the good part. Two days pass, I turn it on. I have a rooster that needs to go, he thinks he’s a much bigger, tougher bird than he really is so I don’t mind if he doesn’t survive the training session.. I carry him into the woods where she normally spends some time close to the house and release him with a handful of cracked corn to keep him busy. Catie has Audie the dog busy around the other side of the house. The dog didn’t see me or the bird, we were upwind, and I used a clean blanket to handle the bird, no Nick scent on the bird…. I sneak back inside with the remote, stand in the window, signal Catie to let the dog go, and Catie comes inside. A couple of minutes later here comes Audie walking towards her spot when she seeds that juicy rooster. She stops still, watches it for just a split second, then I kid you not, she looks around for us. When we are nowhere in sight, she starts to circle the bird about 50’ away from him. He gets a little nervous you can tell. She is still just curious, but I can see from her body language that she’s gearing up for the chase, once she gets back all the way around, she stops again, looks for us a second time, then starts walking towards the bird. When she gets about 20 feet away, he squawks, flaps and starts running. The chase is on now! She closes the distance in no time, the rooster was pretty quick and made it 20 feet or so, he tries to cut back and she just barely closes her mouth on it and the LIGHTNING BIRD bit her at maximum power!!! She had no idea what just happened but in her flight back towards the goat barn that lightning bird must have chased her cause it got her 2 more times real quick on her neck! Phew, she survived the attack, and she never tried to eat a lightning bird ever again.

Training Breakdown

I’ll break down some of the specifics. I did all the pre-training collar wearing so the dog wouldn’t know what happened. I wanted her to associate chasing and here’s the critical part, catching a chicken, with the shock. I didn’t want her to associate being around chickens, or looking at them, or me, or the collar with the shock. I see so many people use those shock collars wrong. If the dog knows the collar shocks them, you’re doing it wrong. You immediately lose the control and the training if the dog knows that the only time they have to behave is when the collar is on. You want the dog to always respect the training you have done no matter if the collar is on, or off. That’s why I really don’t like the beeping thing that lots of people do to train their dogs. You can ask them, they know that the dog acts right and behaves when the collar is on but does what it wants when the collar is off… That’s not effective training in my book. I want the training to be concrete, solid, and established no matter what. I want that dog to be 100% trustworthy with my birds. I can’t afford to have the dog play with a chicken while I’m not there because all it takes is one time to undo dozens of training sessions.

Take goats for example. If that goat is trained well to stay in an electric fence, but gets out one time, then it’s going to take a lot of work to get the goat back to 100% unwilling to touch the fence. So I do my best to make sure the fence always works so I never have problems. If the fence goes down for a day, I don’t have to worry because the animals are well trained and won’t mess with the fence. It buys me time to fix it, and gives me peace of mind. And that’s a very valuable thing to have.

Feeding Rabbits to LGDs

Ok, one more thing before we finish up today’s show. I got over a dozen questions specifically on how I feed my dog rabbit. How do I prepare the food, etcetera… People were talking about recipes for properly balanced food, cooking and chopping vegetables, grains, meat…. UGH I was getting exhausted just reading about spending all that time cooking and prepping meals for a dog! My Goodness!

You ready for the super secret Nick Ferguson method for cutting down on dog food needs? I pick the rabbit up out of the cage. Pet it a little to calm it down, carry it over to where I have a rake or shovel hanging on the barn wall, place the long handled tool on the ground, step lightly on one end, place the rabbit’s head under the handle, step on the other side just enough to hold the rabbit’s neck in place, then pull straight up quickly and sharply holding the back legs. The rabbit is dead within moments. I then carry the dead rabbit over to the fence, call the dog, she comes over. I toss her the rabbit, and I’m done. That’s it, that’s all I do. She eats half that day, the other half the next day. Then I skip a day, and bring her some dog food. She also gets table scraps when we have them, and when we cook larger boned animals like pork or beef bones, she gets bones. If we harvest a deer, we freeze the raw bones, and give them to her monthly. If we harvest chickens or rabbits for our table, she gets the guts. If I skin an animal, the skin goes into the compost pile or straight into the chicken barn floor where it dries out and waits for compost day. But that’s a whole nother system. Come to think of it, I might make that the next episode. If you’d like to hear about how I manage my chickens and learn how easy it is to maximize the nutrient capture with deep litter bedding. Let me know and I’ll do a show on chickens.

I’ll follow up and do another show on dog training, feeding, and all the other LGD questions that poured in so be looking for that. But there’s no way I was going to be able to answer all those questions in a single show.

Until next week

I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”