In Raymond Coppinger’s book on dog origins and behavior, he states that livestock guardian dogs, if they are to be successful, are to show virtually no predatory behavior.
Active herding dogs, like border collies, exhibit predatory behavior towards the stock. In fact, it’s well-established that border collies can easily turn into sheep killers if not carefully managed and trained.
In this view, it is impossible for a dog to be a livestock guardian and herding dog, and in the United States, this is a commonly held assertion. In fact, I held this belief until just a few days ago, when I was confronted with two pieces of evidences. One was a herding Caucasian ovtcharka who belongs to Lindsay Tompkins, who also raises shiba inu. The other was a this post by Dave of the former Little Heelers blog, which has moved to the new Prick-Eared site.
On this site, he has posted a very interesting piece called “Wolf Killing Collies.” In the post, he embeds two videos of dogs in Kazakhstan herding cattle and horeses. Although the post titles leads one to assume these might be traditional herding breeds, the dogs in the videos are Central Asian Ovtcharka, livestock guardian dogs that are know for their courage in fighting wolves and also each other. The ones in Kazakhstan are called Tobet, and they do guard sheep and other stock. But when they are needed to herd, they do herd.
Why these dogs are capable of doing both tasks is a major problem for the Coppinger model. For the Coppinger model to work, both herding and livestock guarding have to be mutually exclusive. Livestock guardian working behavior, according to Coppinger, would have to be devoid of all predatory behavior.
But it’s obviously not the case.
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Ask this wild boar if a livestock guardian has no predatory behavior:
A wolf killing collie? Sure happens a lot around here. Too bad there’s no wolf-killing collie to save the fallen.
The guardian not being used as a herding dog isn’t so much because guardian dogs aren’t predatory, but because the intent in a guardian dog is for them to bond with the stock but not necessarily be “the flock leader”. Consequently, it is often hard to get them to switch gears and put pressure on stock to move them. Pressure in herding comes pretty much from either predatory behavior (the BC archetype) or IMO, pack dominance (the HGH or tending dog archetype), sometimes a combination. One doesn’t generally leave many herding dogs with the stock — they have a tendency to move the stock around too much or engage in predatory behavior if left to their own devices. Nevertheless, there is plenty of documentation regarding using Australian Shepherds, Bouviers and other clear “herding breeds” as the guardian dog as well as the “move them” dog. From the opposite side, the great pyr is known to have been regularly used to “gently guide” stock in addition to it’s role as guard. Crossover isn’t especially rare, but generally speaking, most folk tend to want to specialize their dog in its role, just as with the gun dogs — there are specialists, generalists, and individual dogs who don’t exactly fit the stereotypes.
Peggy Richter.
There was a footage of Spanish Mastiff moving sheep– about 20 of them. It was kind of odd. The sheep follows the Mastiff in the front and centre, and there was a wall of them behind the sheep. However, they weren’t actively herding like the Tobets were.
The other thing, there are stories with my own breed, the Swedish Vallhunds, about farmers leaving the cows to graze out on the pasture and leaving the dog behind with them. The farmer would show the dog the parameter of the field, and the said cattle are not allowed to leave the pasture. However a dog who fail to prevent rustling is considered as a fault as well.
The strangest thing is around dawn, the dog is supposed to drive the cattle home to the barn without any instruction from the farmer.
It’s only strange to me because those behaviours are considered as fault in the meat industry in Canada.
I think I missed this earlier. Here is the video of my CO working sheep for the first time:
Here is the follow up, he has settled down a bit and starts using his brain a little more:
For funsies, a Shiba during a herding evaluation, after she has settled down. She is all like “Give me the magic poo nuggets hanging from your sheepy tail!”: