When we first started using livestock guardian dogs nearly 15 years ago, I often joked that we our sheep operation was "predator-friendly" because our dogs were not. In other words, the protective behavior of our dogs allowed us to avoid using lethal control on coyotes, mountain lions, and other predators in our environment. And in those 15 years, knock on wood, we've never had to kill a predator. This isn't to say we wouldn't use lethal control if we came upon a predator killing our sheep, but our dogs (for the most part) seem to be doing their jobs.

California now has a predator (the gray wolf) that is protected under both the State and Federal Endangered Species Acts. Under both laws, it is illegal to "harm or harass" a wolf - and lethal control (at least in California) is not an option (even if a wolf is killing livestock). Consequently, the potential interaction between LGDs and wolves takes on new implications - could a rancher whose dog injured (or even killed) a gray wolf be held liable for "taking" an endangered species? Would the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which recommends LGDs as a non-lethal livestock protection tool in wolf country, actually prosecute such a case?

Leaving these legal questions aside, new research from South Africa sheds some light on whether LGDs harm wild animals (both predators and non-predators). Analyzing data from 225 LGDs on South African farms between 2005 and 2017, researchers analyzed interactions with herbivores as well as predators. The predators in the region studied included leopards, lions, and brown hyaenas. Interactions were characterized as lethal or non-lethal, as well as defensive or non-defensive.

More than two-thirds of these dogs had no reported interactions with wildlife. Of the 71 dogs that did interact with wildlife, 48% interacted with herbivores, while 73% interacted with predators. Just 9% had lethal interactions with herbivores (where the herbivore was killed); 10% had lethal interactions with predators. All of the documented interactions between LGDs and predators (a total of 44 instances) were defensive in nature (in other words, the predator approached the herd and the dog responded). Ultimately, the authors conclude, "Overall, the conservation benefit of LGDs does not appear to be outweighed by ethical implications of their use; LGDs were shown to be highly targeted and discriminatory towards predators attempting to predate on livestock." In other words, the LGDs in this study were effective at deterring predation while minimizing impacts on non-threatening wildlife.

I found this research especially interesting in light of my own observations of our LGDs and the LGDs used by other California operations. I've never witnessed a direct interaction between our dogs and a predator (which is why we're using GPS collars and trail cameras to try to document these encounters). In my 15 years of using these dogs, I've encountered 2 dead raccoons and 2-3 dead jackrabbits in our sheep paddocks, which I assume were killed by our dogs. I have also observed two of our dogs going after an otter (which is a much more vicious predator than I'd realized). I know that our dogs will respond when they hear coyotes howling in the distance, but I've never seen a direct confrontation.

Working with several range sheep operations this summer, I suspect that wildlife encounters may be more common in these unfenced, herded systems. The herders I've worked with report that the dogs are very active at night (as some of my trail cameras and the GPS data suggest).

I'm interested in learning from other producers - how do your LGDs respond to non-threatening wildlife versus predators? What kinds of things do you do to correct inappropriate behaviors? I hope you'll share your insights in the comments to this blog!

Last Saturday evening, the Tahoe Cattlemen's Association held it's annual membership dinner. Ranchers from Placer and Nevada Counties sat down to a wonderful tri-tip dinner prepared by the Del Oro High School FFA chapter. But despite the great meal and the enjoyable company, many were understandably concerned about the lack of rainfall. And as with any gathering of ranchers in Northern California this November, drought has begun creeping back into conversations here in the Sierra Foothills. When I jokingly asked who could remember the last time it had rained this fall, there was nervous laughter.

For rangeland livestock producers, drought is a different phenomenon than it is for crop farmers or urban dwellers; the dry spell we've experienced over the last month-and-a-half is no exception. Those of us who graze livestock on annual rangelands in Northern California rely on fall precipitation to germinate our fall/winter forage, and to replenish stock ponds and seasonal creeks for stock water.

This year, some parts of the Sierra foothills received a germinating rain in mid/late September. We actually had green grass on some of the annual rangelands where we graze our sheep near Auburn. Unfortunately, since October 1, we've measured just 0.02 inches of rain here at the UCCE office in Auburn. The warm temperatures and dry north winds we had in October pulled moisture out of the soil; the grass that got started in September has mostly died. PG&E's public safety power shutoffs and an unusually abrupt end to irrigation water deliveries in Placer and Nevada Counties have left many ranchers scrambling to provide drinking water to their livestock.

I find that the drier the autumn weather, the more frequently I check the weather apps on my phone. As I write this today, there is no rain in our forecast through November 22. Daniel Swain, who writes the California Weather Blog, suggests that we may finally see some wet weather in Northern California at the end of November. The long-range outlook from the National Weather Service, however, remains bleak - a 40 percent chance of below average rainfall in California through January.

While these forecasts can be depressing, I also know that conditions can change rapidly (and counter to what the weather experts predict). From October 2013 through the end of January 2014, for example, we measured less than 4 inches of rain in Auburn; in February 2014, we received almost 9 inches! More recently, in December 2017 we

received less than an inch of rain; the next month brought more than 7 inches (and 2018 forage production set records in the foothills). From a practical standpoint, perhaps the best drought strategy is to hope for the best, but plan for the worst!

Given the lack of green forage on our annual rangelands at the moment, and the lack of stormy weather on the horizon, what does planning for the worst look like? What actions should we be taking now to reduce the impact of both short-term and long-term drought?

Develop a Forage Budget: Most of us stock our grazing land conservatively - we try to manage our grazing during the spring and summer months to make sure we have fall feed. But do you know how much feed you actually have this fall? Do you know how many days of grazing you have before your fall feed is gone? Since the 2013-14 drought year, we've kept track of our forage supply and demand (or carrying capacity and stocking rate). Rather than use the standard unit of an Animal Unit Month (or AUM, the amount of forage consumed by a 1000-lb cow and her calf in one month), we track sheep days per acre. Granted this measurement is very specific to OUR sheep, but it gives us a useful estimate of our specific supply and demand. In the last two weeks, we've analyzed our winter pastures and determined that without forage growth, and with our current sheep inventory, we'll run out of feed in mid/late January. This is not a happy discovery, obviously, but it does help us focus on our options for addressing this shortfall.

Increase Forage Supply: You may have heard the adage, "Don't feed your way out of a drought" - you may have even heard it from me! And while feeding hay quickly becomes prohibitively expensive, there may be other ways to increase forage supply. In our case this fall, a friend offered us 40 acres of alfalfa stubble for the sheep. Instead of moving to our winter pastures this weekend, we'll save that forage for late December. Other options might be talking with a neighbor about an ungrazed property, or even hauling stockwater to an under-utilized portion of your own ranch. Obviously economics come into play here, too - is hauling water or building fence more expensive than feeding hay? That question will be answered differently for every operation!

Decrease Forage Demand: Selling animals is never an easy decision. One of the most difficult days in the 15 years we've raised sheep commercially was the day in January 2014 when I sorted off bred ewes to haul to the auction - we were out of forage and weren't sure when it would rain again. That said, giving some thought to the animals you could sell - or those you'd keep at all costs - helps make that decision easier. This year, we've prioritized the following animals for sale if the dry weather persists:

1. Open/cull ewes
2. Older rams
3. Excess feeder lambs
4. Replacement ewe lambs
5. Old/thin bred ewes

Given the cost of hauling sheep to the auction, we want to make sure we have more than one or two; that said, when the sheep come off the alfalfa next month, the cull ewes, older rams, and excess feeder lambs will be sold. We'll save forage for the bred ewes and the replacement ewe lambs.

Selling breeding females is a more difficult decision for us. We can't simply go to the auction when it starts to rain and purchase bred ewes that fit our system and our forage resources; indeed, we're still recovering from selling sheep in 2014. And selling an asset (a ewe lamb or a heifer, for example) means we forego the future income she'd produce. We need to compare the money we'll save in the short term (by not having to buy feed) with the income we'll lose by selling breeding animals. There are a number of more sophisticated economic analysis tools we can use to consider these types of decisions.

Develop Stock Water Infrastructure: Fall stock water is often a limiting factor for many rangeland operations. If ponds haven't filled and creeks aren't running, pastures can't be grazed. While long term solutions (like drilling wells or installing water tanks and troughs) may be expensive and time consuming, short term solutions (like hauling water) may allow us to access additional forage resources. For example, in the winter of 2014-2015, I managed the cattle at the UC Sierra Foothill Research and Extension Center in Browns Valley. As you might recall, that winter was also exceptionally dry. In January, we realized we had more than 20 acres of grass growing along the road system on part of the facility - grass that was outside of our pastures. By hauling water to portable troughs placed on the road, we were able to graze this otherwise unusable forage. And we were able to give the regular pastures a much-needed rest. Hauling water, in other words, bought us time (and forage).

Because ranches are also businesses, we need to consider the financial, economic, and tax consequences of our drought strategies, as well. The UC Rangelands Drought Information Hub has a number of outstanding resources on these topics, as well as links to long-range forecasts. And I'm happy to help you walk through these considerations on your own operation - we can develop a forage budget, talk about water development, and discuss other drought management strategies. In the meantime, remember that staring at your weather app and cursing the weather forecast (as I have done) are not effective drought strategies!

Warning: the video link in this blog post includes images of a sheep killed by a coyote.

This story begins several weeks back. We split our ewe flock into two breeding groups in late September, and kept a third group (of replacement ewe lambs, who won't be bred until next fall) separate. With three groups of sheep, we felt like we needed to put our youngest livestock guardian dog (10-month-old Dillon) with the lambs. He had been with a handful of lambs at our home place, and seemed to be fine - a bit exuberant (as puppies can be), but fine.

A week into this situation, we noticed that one of the lambs had a chewed ear. We've had young dogs that occasionally chewed on ears, so we weren't too worried. In the next several days, four more lambs were injured, several seriously. We decided to put Dillon with a group of older ewes and rams.

His inappropriate behavior continued - and escalated. He began chasing sheep, which culminated with a ewe that became tangled in the electronet and died. We brought Dillon home (and put a "dangle stick" on his collar to make chasing sheep uncomfortable). The older dog went back with the breeding group, and we left the ewe lambs protected only by electric fence.

Fast-forward to this week. On Wednesday, we moved the lambs to a new paddock partly enclosed by electro-net fencing, partly by hard-wire sheep fence. On Thursday morning, we found a dead lamb in the paddock.

The rancher part of me was upset - we would expect this ewe lamb to grow up to produce five or six sets of lambs. The farm advisor part of me decided that this was an educational opportunity - I wanted to learn how to tell what kind of predator had killed the lamb.

I made a quick call to our local wildlife specialist (in Placer County, these folks work for the county - in other areas, county trappers are employed by USDA Wildlife Services). He looked a a few photos and said, "That looks like a coyote." He also told me how to investigate the carcass to know for sure.

You might wonder, why would this matter? The lamb was dead. As a rancher, I wanted to know what I was dealing with! Coyotes can get through a 4x6 inch hole; mountain lions can go over most fences. Mountain lions are protected by the State of California; coyotes, at the moment, are not. As a scientist, I was inherently curious. I wanted to know the differences between coyotes and mountain lions in terms of predatory behaviors.

Our trapper told me, "A mountain lion will usually kill its prey by crushing the base of the skull from above and behind; a coyote will kill by crushing the trachea from below. A lion will not usually eat the digestive tract; a coyote will eat everything. A lion will bury what it doesn't eat; a coyote will eat in the open and leave the rest." He also told me that skinning the neck of the lamb would confirm the predator involved: "Hemmoraghing on the throat would indicate a coyote; wounds on the top of the neck at the base of the skull would suggest a mountain lion."

Fortunately, I had my hunting pack in the pack seat of my truck (including rubber gloves and a sharp knife). I skinned the neck and found lots of trauma around the trachea - and no wounds on the top of the neck. We were dealing with a coyote, as the video below indicates.

 

We resolved the issue (hopefully) by bringing Dillon back to guard the lambs. We left his dangle stick on with the hope that he wouldn't chase the sheep. We also moved the sheep to a new paddock that was more secure. Our landlords told me this morning that they'd heard coyotes - and Dillon barking - most of the night. And we did not lose any more lambs.

As a shepherd, the premature death of any animal feels like a failure. I hate to put a young dog in a position where we have to rely on him before he's ready; I also hate to subject our sheep to depredation. But I also recognize that there are economic considerations involved. Treating the lambs that Dillon injured earlier in the month has cost us money; losing a ewe lamb to a coyote cost us more. These kinds of trade-offs are part of ranching, I suppose; my job as a farm advisor is to help others evaluate these choices objectively.

In the next several weeks, I hope to offer a tool to help others compare the cost of using a livestock guardian dog against the benefits. Stay tuned!

Like any livestock management tool, livestock guardian dogs come with both costs and (hopefully) benefits. Some of these are easily calculated - for example, through today, we've spent $624.70 on dog food and veterinary costs related to our livestock guardian dogs this year. We currently have 3 dogs (Bodie, a 3-year-old I purchased as a pup for $350; Elko, a 2-year-old given to me as a pup; and Dillon, a 9-month-old pup purchased for $500). Some of the costs and benefits are less easily calculated, however; how do I know how many sheep didn't die because we had dogs with them? What is the value of my own peace of mind? A recent paper by Dr. Ellen Bruno (Cooperative Extension specialist in agriculture and resource economics at UC Berkeley) and Dr. Tina Saitone (CE specialist in agriculture and resource economics at UC Davis) sheds new light on these questions. Read the complete paper here.

Using data from the University of California's Hopland Research and Extension Center, Bruno and Saitone estimated that dogs reduced lambs lost to coyotes by 43% each year; ewe losses were reduced by 25%. The authors calculated the present value of these prevented deaths over the 7-year useful life of the dogs to be $16,200 (present value calculations were based on the market value of the lambs as well as the value of running-age ewes). Their model was based on using one dog per 100 ewes (more on this below).

On the cost side, the authors included initial purchase of pups, dog food (and labor associated with feeding the dogs), veterinary costs, and dog replacement costs. Labor costs, as they note, are largely dependent on the type of production system - Hopland's labor costs are probably much higher than the typical commercial operation. Using net present value analysis, Bruno and Saitone found that the costs of Hopland's livestock guardian dogs exceeded the benefits (in the value of lambs and ewes not killed by predators) by $13,412 over the seven-year analysis period. In other words, the dogs didn't pay their own way.

Bruno and Saitone offer several important caveats when interpreting these results. First, many ranchers report that dogs eliminate predation entirely (which has been our own experience). If this had been the case at Hopland, the benefits would have exceeded the costs of using dogs by over $12,000. Second, labor-related expenses associated with dogs can be difficult to quantify. In our operation, feeding the dogs is part of our daily check of fences and sheep - we see the sheep every day whether we have dogs with them or not. We charge about 5 minutes per day to feeding 3 dogs - even if I pay myself $20 per hour for this work, our "dog" labor amounts to $371 per dog annually. Hopland, on the other hand, reported labor costs of nearly $1,600 per dog per year. Finally, the authors note that lamb and ewe prices may (and usually do) change from one year to the next - and sometimes dramatically. Sheep values can alter the cost:benefit ratio.

Skeptics might wonder, "Even if you use dogs, if you're not experiencing any predator losses, maybe there aren't any predators around." My ongoing research into livestock guardian dog behavior suggests that there are ALWAYS predators around where small ruminants are grazing (whether on rangeland or irrigated pasture). Using trail cameras, we frequently "capture" coyotes, foxes, and bobcats within 10-15 feet of our sheep paddocks. Interviews with sheep- and goatherders working in the Sierra Nevada indicate that coyotes are heard - and often seen - every night near sheep and goat bed grounds. Though we see them less frequently, we know there are mountain lions and black bears in the vicinity of these operations. The predators are there - the dogs must be at least partly responsible for the lack of predator losses!

As I've written previously, the number of dogs used by producers can vary greatly - from one producer to the next, and from one season to the next on the same operation (see How Many Dogs?). One of the bands of sheep I'm observing near Truckee is guarded by a single dog (band is roughly 1,000 ewes - this scenario is significantly more cost effective than the 1 dog per 100 ewes ratio used in Bruno and Saitone's model). This ratio works because the band is comprised of mature ewes without lambs - and because the predators have plenty of other prey at this time of year. Once this band moves back to Los Banos to lamb on alfalfa stubble later this fall, the dog-to-sheep ratio will increase.

In my experience, peace of mind for the shepherd (or goatherd) can be a significant (if qualitative) benefit. My friends Brad Fowler and Nathan Medlar recently started a targeted grazing project at Squaw Valley Ski Resort north of Lake Tahoe (see Watching Other Dogs). They started the project without livestock guardian dogs (mostly to avoid conflicts with recreationists). They are herding the goats on the ski slopes during the day and penning them at night near their camp (a tent on the side of the mountain). Brad reported that neither they nor the goats slept at all on the first night - the coyotes kept the goats stirred up even though they were protected by electric fence. Brad and Nathan added two dogs on the second day - which relaxed the goats (and the goatherds). Brad reported both herders and livestock slept soundly on the second night.

Finally, research at the U.S. Sheep Center in Dubois, Idaho, found "that ewes grazing with accompanying LGD will travel greater daily distances compared with ewes grazing without LGD accompaniment. As a result of traveling greater distances, ewes may also be exposed to more and varied foraging opportunities." See Webber et al. 2015 for the complete study. To me, this suggests that dogs may make our grazing operations more efficient - allowing us to access forage that would otherwise not get grazed by unprotected livestock. This increased grazing efficiency can reduce our supplemental feed costs.

From my perspective, perhaps the most important part of Bruno and Saitone's work comes at the end of the paper:

"Sheep producers who are considering the purchase of LGDs, or those who already have LGDs and are interested in their return on investment, need a few pieces of data to make this determination. Market lamb and ewe prices are typically well known to producers and can be used, in conjunction with efficacy rates from this study, to estimate the benefits of LGDs.

"On the cost side, producers would need to make some logical forecasts about the time required to maintain LGDs, given their operation specifics.... Also, using guidance from the literature included herein, producers could calculate the likely dog cull and mortality costs of the LGD's useful life."

Ultimately, the success of any livestock protection tool (including lethal control) is highly variable depending on operator characteristics and environmental conditions. Dogs work in our operation because we see the sheep every day and because they are our only option for protecting lambing ewes (we lamb on pasture without access to a lambing shed). Dogs work for the range outfit on the Tahoe National Forest as well; human presence, the vigilance of the dogs, and the stage of production during their time in the mountains virtually eliminates predator losses. And dogs work for the targeted grazing outfits I work with in the foothills and mountains; peace of mind and lack of predator losses justify the costs of keeping dogs in these operations, too.