Of Livestock Guardian Dogs, Mountain Lions, and Wildlife Services

As I wrapped up my chores this morning (checking sheep and moving irrigation), I headed home to drop off one of my herding dogs before heading to my day job. As I drove down Mt. Vernon Road west of Auburn, I passed my friend Eric Lopez, who works for Placer County Public Works. Ignoring my phone on the short drive home (actually, I didn't realize I'd had any calls), I saw that Eric had called twice after we passed each other.

I called him back, and he asked if we still had sheep at the corner of Mt. Vernon and Shanley Roads (we do). He told me that he'd seen a mountain lion and two cubs just a mile up the road (near the county animal shelter, and just a half-mile from my UC Cooperative Extension office in Auburn. He'd spoken with our local wildlife specialist (another friend, Dave Bugenig), who told him the cougar had been seen off and on over the last several months in the vicinity of Shanley Road. Where we have sheep.

Perhaps I should share a bit about the sheep we have at this location. Until Tuesday evening, we'd grazed our replacement ewe lambs and feeder lambs at Oak Hill Ranch. On Tuesday, we added 10 older ewes who needed the added nutrition of irrigated pasture. Last night, I sorted the lambs off and hauled them (and their livestock guardian dog, Elko) to another property. The only sheep left at this location are the older ewes. And with Elko gone, these ewes were only protected by our electro-net fencing.

After talking with Eric, we decided that we needed a livestock guardian dog with the ewes. Our only option was our puppy, Dillon (who is 7-1/2 months old). Dillon has been with a handful of yearling ewes at the house - bonding with our sheep and learning to respect them. He's still just a pup (in fact, he's going through his terrible teenage period), but he's got a big bark. And at 75 pounds, he's a physically impressive teenager to boot! This evening, he had his first ride in the back of my pickup - and he's now responsible for security at Oak Hill Ranch.

All of this is a long introduction to the main point of this essay. As I've written before, we're committed to nonlethal tools for philosophical (and, more importantly, for practical) reasons. We graze sheep on property that we don't own. We graze pastures surrounded by rural-residential properties. I'm not able to practice lethal control of predators for these reasons. That's not to say I wouldn't ask our local wildlife specialists (ours are employed by our county; others work for USDA Wildlife Services) for help if we had a serious problem. I wouldn't hesitate to ask for help taking out a predator that I knew was killing my sheep. Thankfully, I haven't had to ask for this kind of help.

But our wildlife specialists (I still call them trappers) help us in other ways. Today's events are a great example - my friend Dave told us that there'd been a lion working in the area where we had our sheep - and so we put a dog with the older ewes.

These next couple of weeks will be a good test for Dillon. He's still a pup, but his size and impressive bark should be intimidating to most predators. We've put him with older ewes, who should reinforce the manners that our yearling ewes have been trying to teach him.

Protecting our sheep from coyotes, mountain lions, black bears, and domestic dogs (our main predators) is a dynamic and adaptive process. We have to pay attention to the costs - each dog costs us $400 a year just in food - that's 3 lambs' worth of income. We have to pay attention to the kinds of predators that are present at any given time - neighbor dogs and coyotes represent very different threats. And we rely on the folks who understand these predators better than we do. Our local wildlife specialists are an incredible source of real-time information about what's happening around our sheep. Wildlife Services is critical to our success in using nonlethal livestock protection tools.