Farm Fresh Blog

The holidays have passed and now for most of the world, the vacation has ended and they're back to work.

But if you have a ranch, then there was no vacation from work.

And if ranching is your passion, it isn't work. My hope for you, Dear Reader, is that you find your passion, so that every day you live a life where you don't need a vacation.

After the bleating of the sheep has lulled to a comfortable chewing, the dogs and I take a walk just as the sun begins to climb its way into the blue sky. This morning routine serves both to exercise dogs after a long cold night, and allow them to re- fortify the perimeter with a wall of urine. Make no mistake, this ritual is more than a simple walk. Great detail is paid to reading the events of the night before. This is the Canine Facebook.

Winter is here and the coyotes are becoming bold enough to be seen in the daytime away from the ranch. The regular bleating of sheep and goats is sure to lure in empty bellies hoping for an easy meal.  Each morning we not only walk the boundaries of the sheep pasture, but we expand our wall of urine and scratch marks deeper into enemy territory where coyote and cougar have been free to prowl. We tag their wall with our own urine graffiti. A new pack is in town. They're wearing sheep bells and they have teeth, and they want the predators to know it.

With the sheep still munching in the barn, this is a time for the dogs to hunt and to play games which keep them in peak physical condition.

They sharpen their skills on each other, and tag team the Border Collie in a frightening shadow of a kill.

We end our walk to return back to kennels for a raw breakfast of chicken or beef - the bounty after the hunt. I watch an entire chicken leg quarter disappear with a few casual crunches and marvel at the power of jaws that arguably belong to a Elementary School Student. It is easy to forget the Anatolians are only 7 months old, as they are bigger than the other dogs, and are already earning their keep as Livestock Guardian Dogs. 

If there is ever any doubt about whether these dogs are necessary, one need only look to the ground. The proof is in the tracks lurking below the house.

I've never been one to make New Year's resolutions. Why set myself up for failure? I'm a weak-willed person. That's my favorite part about me. Let's just go ahead and accept that if the lemon pie is in the refrigerator, I'm gonna eat it. If I have the option to lie in bed and read a book, or jog, I'm gonna read that book. I might read a book about jogging, or about a jogger eaten by a cougar, but you get the point. New Year's resolutions are lost on me.

I'm not likely to start doing yoga because it's January 1. I'm more likely to start doing yoga because I'm fat and can't reach reach my stirrup anymore. Now THAT'S more incentive than a date on the calendar. Resolutions are for goal-oriented people. I'm not that. Mine is not a dedicated paddling down the rapids of life, mine is more a lazy canoe ride downstream. From time to time I dip my oar in the water with a half-hearted attempt to change direction, but most of the time, my boat follows the current. Sometimes the flow takes me into the rapids, but instead of furious paddling, I just keep my hands in the boat and hope to stay upright.

The current has taken me places I never would have planned for myself, but through it all, I never stopped being myself. Know who you are, and as Shakespeare would say, "To thine own self be true."

"We are who we're going to be when we're very old, and when we're very old we are who we were when we were 8."     Meryl Streep

When I was 8, I was a child of the forest who dreamed of horses and writing books. I don't expect much to change when I'm 80.  If you like who you were when you were 8 years old, why beat yourself up every January 30 because you couldn't maintain the goals you set for yourself on January 1?

Who you are is not about your weight, your money, your wrinkles, your job, or what other people think of you. Who you are is about how you touch the world around you. Do you bring goodness? Can you be a blessing to others? Can you lift someone up when they're down? Those things aren't numbers on a scale or a paycheck.

So perhaps the new year isn't a time for making promises but a chance to decide if you are being true to the 8 year old inside of you.

Humans aren't the only ones who have trouble with the neighbors. Since we moved the expectant mother cows and calves into the pasture near the house, they are in closer contact with the sheep - and Briar. Big White Dawg just can not stand a cow staring at her sheep. Because we want the cows as close to the barn as possible, we feed them close to the fence. In addition to a round bale of hay, I also toss red top cane hay over the fence into their troughs. Because cows are messy, and sometimes the hay comes apart as I toss it, there is often a trail of hay near the fence on both sides. As soon as the goats and sheep are released from their pens, they race to this loose hay for a buffet. The morning after it snowed, the buffet became a hockey match.

I felt sorry for them because: A) goats are pitiful in cold weather, and  B) everyone had been locked inside the barn for a couple of cold rainy days leading up to the snow and they wanted more roughage.  So instead of watching them play hockey over the remaining dregs of hay, I got them their own bale. They were delighted. (except the goats. The goats were still miserable. Anything below 60 degrees is frowned upon. Anything resembling wet weather is Goat Hell.)

Even though the cows had their own hay, they were attracted to the fence by this new bale that was quickly being scarfed up by midget not-cow creatures. This freaked Briar out. There are rules about staring at sheep. The rules: Don't Stare At Sheep!

She snapped at them a couple of times to back them away and then settled down under her tree to supervise.

They were warned politely, but the sound of the neighbors enjoying hay was too much for them, and the younger ones ventured close to the fence again. It is amazing how fast a dysplastic dog can move with the proper motivation.

I think the roll must be the canine equivalent of an end zone dance. "I scored. You lost. You suck. This is my side of the fence. Don't forget it! Quit staring at sheep!"

And back to her post she went.

And this is why the cows hate Briar.

I stared at it for a moment in stunned silence. I looked up at the house and back down again. No doubt. Nope. Ten dogs is not too many dogs . . . .

It snowed last night. This added another dimension to our morning patrol.

Each day after I feed the livestock I take the dogs for a walk so they can spread their scent along the predator side of the fence line.

Today our patrol started out as great fun for all of us but soon the dogs got serious.

Afraid we'd run into a pack of wild hogs, I called the dogs back. We returned to the house where I locked them in kennels and went inside for breakfast. A hour or so later Other Half and I fed the cattle and the horses some more groceries, and then we went to check the deer feeder at the blind near the pasture below the house.

I whipped out the camera to photograph tracks in the snow.

The more I looked, the more animals I found. And all was well until I found this:

That's a cat. That's a cat the size of Briar. I can only think of one cat around here the size of a Great Pyrenees.

Yes, a cougar. A cougar was within shouting distance of the house this morning. The cat was uncomfortably close to little Melvin.

The cat was also pretty close to where the dogs and I turned around and went back, where I walked alone into the forest with six dogs and no gun.

No, ten dogs is not too many.

One of my favorite things about Christmas is that for this one day life slows down and gives us time to reflect. Everything is closed. There's no place you need to go and nothing you have to do, so there's no reason to feel guilty about just relaxing. It's also a great time to sit back and take stock of your blessings.

I did a lot of that these past two days.

This is my view from the kitchen door. Living inside the barn has a lot of perks.

We were able to fit in some time to ride just for fun. That hasn't happened a lot lately. It's hard to believe that two retired people living in the middle of nowhere can't make time to ride. Dear Friend Mindy (long distance ranch hand) brought her family to spend the holiday with us and she and I stole away on Tiny and Musket.

I do love this big red horse.

I reckon this is probably one of the best places to spend some time counting your blessings - on the back of a horse.  So as the sun sets on another Christmas, take a minute to slow down and reflect on all the goodness in your life.

Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Here's a little Morning Melvin for your coffee break. There are worse ways to start your day than sipping coffee with a calf!  :)

The buzzard slowly riding the wind over the creek cast a shadow on the ground as he passed above me. When you're missing a cow you look for these things, so the damned bird cast a shadow on my mood as he glided by.

When she didn't come in to eat the night before it was time to get worried. While Other Half doesn't trouble himself to name the cattle, I name the ones that stand out. I called this girl Secretariat because she is a racehorse at dinner time. When that cow gets called for supper, the Chariots Of Fire theme song plays in the background. Girlfriend doesn't miss a meal, so when she didn't come in, something was wrong. We started counted down the days since she'd been bred and realized we were late locking her in the pens near the house. She was now somewhere, in a forest thick with coyotes, trying to have a Charolais calf by herself.

Cows often wander off to give birth, but we like to keep everyone confined so we can monitor them. We haven't had to pull a calf since we started breeding to Angus bulls, but this little girl was from a group of heifers that had been bred to a nice young Charolais in South Texas when our Angus bull was in North Texas. I had some serious concerns about breeding first time mothers to a breed of bull noted for throwing big calves, but Other Half didn't share my worries until he was walking through  the forest with a flashlight hoping to find his cow before the coyotes did.

Two hours of driving and walking in the dark proved fruitless. The next morning she still didn't come up. We decided she was either dead, had a calf, or both. By noon she dragged in for breakfast, looking like a gutted snowbird. Since she is normally fat and healthy, there was no doubt that she'd had a calf. Whether the calf was alive or not was another matter entirely.

While she ate, Other Half and I formulated a plan. In hindsight, we might have put more time into our plan. Since you could hide an elephant out here and not find it, our chances of tumbling over a newborn calf were slim and none.  Our only hope was to follow the cow back to her calf. If the calf was dead, then so be it. It was a major financial loss, but at least the cow was still alive. On the other hand, if the calf was alive, and just hidden, waiting for his mother to return, he probably wouldn't survive the night alone with a first time mother. Coyotes are bad this year. We've already lost one calf, and the neighbor has lost four lambs.

I glanced at the time. We had guests coming for Christmas. The house was still a mess, and I had not put up one single Christmas decoration yet. It's been busy. We hadn't even bought a tree. Since we are surrounded by trees, the plan had been to find a likely candidate and bring a fresh tree in the house. We just hadn't found the time to do that yet. So I stood in a pile of cow shit, texting a friend to explain why her family would arrive tomorrow to a house filled with sand and dog hair. She sent this text:

"Is your tree up?"

God bless her. She knows me well. And loves me anyway. The plan had been to have a nice country Christmas for her son. Instead I was watching a cow watch me while I texted. We decided we could salvage Christmas by letting son and father tromp out in the forest and pick out their own tree. Can't get more Country than that!

The cow finished her cubes, let out a loud bawl, and slowly began to amble toward the pond. The game's afoot! I texted Other Half who had positioned himself on a 4Wheeler near the direction she had come from earlier. The plan was to keep a loose tail on her and thus allow the cow to lead us to her calf. We failed to consider anything past that, leaving us woefully unprepared for the rest of the afternoon.

Secretariat stopped at the pond for a drink, then she bawled again and headed off into the forest. I texted Other Half our direction of travel. Cell phone reception is spotty and since two reasonably intelligent people failed to get the walkie talkies while the cow was eating, I was stuck trying to avoid briars, branches and snakes while texting like a teenager at the mall.
 

Over my career in police work, I spent my share of time working with narcotics, and I'm one to give credit where credit is due. I've tailed drug dealers less wily than this cow. I gave that quite a bit of thought as I trailed the first time mother through the tangled mess of briars and cedars. The day was just warm enough to coax out the copperheads and so once again, I thanked God and Chippewa for snake boots as I trudged through the forest bed of thick leaves. I quickly gave up texting our direction. Just keeping an eye on a full size cow moving like a wisp of smoke through the trees was enough to keep me busy. It took an embarrassingly short amount of time to lose me.

Well, the upside was that I could text my direction again as I tracked her footprints. The downside was that the only thing worse than Other Half's hearing is his sense of direction. As I hiked through the forest, passing many Christmas tree Candidates, I tallied up the cost of another lost calf. I emerged from the forest onto the road by the creek where I met Other Half. Despite the fact that fresh tracks went through here, he confirmed that he didn't see a large black Ninja cow pass. My guess was that he found cell phone reception and was playing on Facebook while I was trudging through a tick-infested forest.

Since he was on the 4Wheeler, he followed the road to the creek while I followed the cow tracks and entered the forest again. I soon ran out of tracks in the thick leaves.  I was reminded of that damned buzzard again as I headed east through the woods. This was the area where the last calf was killed.

A stick snapped in the forest ahead of me, so I forged on down a game trail. The path ended at the creek, and there standing above where the calf was killed last summer was my Drug Dealer Cow nursing a healthy bull calf. I took a moment to thank God, admire the dappled sun playing across her back, and catch my breath.

I then directed Other Half to our location so he could inspect the new addition to the herd. The calf was a big boned hulky cuss.

Other Half asked, "What are you going to name him?"

"Melvin."

I have no idea why. It just popped in my head. Melvin finished his lunch, smacked his lips, and regarded us with a quiet curious look, and that's when the Ninja cow just walked off, taking Melvin with her. Now here's the point where we realized that we had absolutely no clue how we were going to get Melvin back to the house. He was disappearing into the forest at an alarming speed for someone so young. The cow was just walking, Melvin was hiking behind her, and I was left swatting briars and cedar branches again. Very quickly I gave up looking for copperheads. A $1200 calf was walking away and he wouldn't survive the night if I lost him in the woods.

It is at this point I want to pause and share a short note about relationships and marriage. Some couples actually discuss plans. They may have intelligent, meaningful give and take conversations where the views of the other are weighed and measured before a plan is cemented. Other people shout and cuss at each other while each tries to take charge of the situation because one person is clearly wrong, and we wouldn't be in the situation if the other person has just checked his cows like he was supposed to. I'm not gonna tell you what kind of couple we are, but I will say it is never a good idea to walk off into the forest with angry crime scene investigator who can kill you and make it look like a suicide.

So the cow continued through the forest.

And she popped out on the road, and crossed the creek.

And entered the forest again. And little Melvin followed along like a puppy on a string. Other Half got lost on the 4Wheeler while I trailed the cows through the cedar, briars, ticks, copperheads, feral hogs, and a partridge in a pear tree. There was more shouted cussing in the forest and eventually Other Half got off the 4Wheeler and joined me as I tracked Ninja Cow. We'd still be tracking that cow if Melvin hadn't run out of gas - or milk.

My plan had been to catch Melvin, put him on the 4Wheeler, and slow roll our little circus back to the house. I'm not sure what Other Half had planned. It involved a lot of cussing about leaving without walkie talkies, a cowhorse, a Border Collie, or a rope, and I soon lost interest. Plans should involve what we have, not what we don't have. What we had was a long piece of parachute rope, a 4Wheeler with half a tank of gas, a cell phone with 20% battery, and a pissed off wife who should have been cleaning house but was instead chasing cows through the freakin' forest!

The only two useful items from the above list was the rope and the 4Wheeler.

So we gently tackled Melvin and hoped his mother wouldn't stomp us to death.

Fortunately she was one of the cows I had raised at the house so she knew us and although she expressed concern, she didn't try out that insurance policy. There was more cussing about the pros and cons of tying Melvin's legs, how heavy he was, and who was hiking back for the 4Wheeler.

After a ride back that resembled the OJ Simpson slow speed hot pursuit, we finally deposited Melvin in a catch pen behind the house where his relieved mother joined him.

And thus begins the new calving season. Lessons learned: Do not leave the house for any reason without a rope, a gun, a knife, a pair of snake boots, a Border Collie, and a good sense of humor. And if you do, remember this: Prison orange is not your color.
 

My posts have spawned a lot of discussion regarding the pros and cons of working homes versus pet homes for Livestock Guardian Dog breeds, so let's wade into this debate today. And yes, this argument really applies to ALL breeds of working dogs. It's not merely a Livestock Guardian Breed issue, just as many Border Collies are at the pound for the same reason. People get a Ferrari when they should be driving a Volkswagon. Folks, an Anatolian Shepherd Dog is a Ferrari. A Border Collie is a Ferrari. A Great Pyrenees is a Ferrari. I'm not saying you can't drive one, I'm just saying that if you don't do your research and learn how, you're gonna end up wrapped around a telephone pole.

And this never ends well for the dog.

Don't let this become a pride issue for you. I've trained dogs my entire adult life and I can assure you, I just "thought" I was a dog trainer until I got a working Bloodhound. Tried and true methods I'd used for years simply did not work with that highly intelligent dog who had very little motivation to do anything other than the mantrailing game. I had to throw out the playbook and try something else. She made me a better dog trainer and really prepared me for the world of Livestock Guardian Dogs, so don't let hubris get in your way. Training a Labrador does not prepare you for the independent mind of a Great Pyrenees.

 Does that mean you can't do it? Of course not! I ended up with a great working Bloodhound. Just do your research and prepare yourself. Look at the pluses and minuses of that breed very carefully and decide if they're things you can live with, and this is different for everyone. Trust me, I think Jack Russell Terriers are the cutest little farts, but I know enough about them, and me, to know that I'm not man enough (wo-man enough!) to handle the things they do that terrier people just take in stride. We all have things that are deal breakers. Since I accept my limitations, I just admire terriers from a distance.

Some may argue that a Livestock Guardian Dog needs a flock and cannot function in a pet home. The same is often said of Border Collies. This rhetoric leads people to believe that unless they live on a large farm their dog won't be happy. On the flip side, we've got folks feeling guilty because their farm dog is also a pet. They're told their dog is not a REAL Livestock Guardian Dog if he's not living in the Back Forty alone with a flock of sheep.

First and foremost, any dog is happier in a good home where he has a job and is loved by a responsible owner. The word "pet" is often seen as a dirty word in ranching and working dog circles. It shouldn't be. All my dogs are pets - even the working dogs. I believe "pet" dogs have a better working relationship with their handlers than dogs that are treated simply as tools. The real issue is not is the animal a pet, but are his physical and psychological needs being satisfied?

And before we go any further, read this: No dog is happy thrown outside with no social contact. If your dog is living on a chain or in a tiny fenced area in the corner of your back yard, where company won't see the holes he digs, you are the problem, not the dog.

So back to Livestock Guardian Dogs, a pet dog wants a something to guard and a working dog wants the security and stability of a happy home. I would argue a dog is far better off in a good pet home than he is thrown into the pasture by a rancher who thinks that Livestock Guardian Dogs shouldn't be handled. I also believe that a pet home is not a "good" pet home if they don't do their research and fully understand and appreciate what drives that dog. Generations upon generations of behaviors are hardwired into the DNA of your dog.

So let's summarize the three main points:

1) If you have a Livestock Guardian Dog and don't have livestock it doesn't mean your dog won't be happy guarding you and the kids, just prepare yourself for barking all night and crawling over and under the fence. Yes, I understand not every Livestock Guardian Breed dog does this, but enough of them do to it that these dogs should come with a warning label, so don't fool yourself into thinking that cute little polar bear cub won't act that way. He will. Get over it, work around, or don't take him home in the first place.

2) If you have livestock and a Livestock Guardian Dog, but it's also a pet, you shouldn't feel guilty about that. The proof is in the pudding. If you wake up in the morning and all your sheep are still there, I guess it doesn't mean a tinker's damn that the dog comes in the living room to watch television with the kids, now does it?

3) If you have livestock but don't have a Livestock Guardian Dog, I can't help you much. I got nothing. If I were you, I'd get a dog. Trust me, they're worth it.