"dogs and coyotes oh my" Topic

This is a fascinating article about guardian dogs who are raised with sheep etc -- even to the point of pups being nursed by ewes -- so that they consider themselves a part of the herd and will defend it.

link

So I asked GROK about applicability to my 1840s Texas scenarios and got a detailed and excellent analysis of what works and what doesn't. Which I can post if anyone is interested. But the upshot is that I am going to expand my basic "defend the butchering camp from predators" scenario to include, e.g., Hispanic ranchers doing hides and beef and tallow, and German farmers slaughtering lots of pigs. Once again, the AI is an invaluable tool, because it remembers all the work I have done on related topics and can pull a lot of threads together. The key is to use it regularly and consistently and not as a one-off source.

"The Hill Country makes up part of a vast region known as the Edwards Plateau. As a matter of both geography and legend, there is no place closer to the heart of Texas. Occupying tens of thousands of square miles—an area more than twice the size of Massachusetts—­the plateau encompasses the intersection of Central, South and West Texas. It is bordered by Austin and San Antonio to the east, and to the west by the Pecos River and the Chihuahuan Desert. Its history is exceptionally violent. By the 1700s, the Tonkawa people were driven out by the Apache, who were in turn nearly exterminated by the Comanche. For much of the 19th century, the plateau was a site of the Texas-Indian wars, which resulted in the destruction and displacement of numerous Indigenous nations and became fodder for countless Westerns, including John Ford's The Searchers. Until the Civil War, white settlers primarily raised cattle; as overgrazing depleted the once-rich grasslands, they brought in increasingly large herds of sheep and goats, whose diets were well suited to manage brush."

"Buchholz and his brother devised a system that Buchholz says he hasn't much tinkered with: "Sometimes you roll the dice and you get the right number." They built simple "bonding pens": enclosed areas measuring roughly 40 feet by 40 feet and isolated from people and other animals. "That female that's fixin' to whelp, she whelps with a [sheep or a goat] in the pen. Those little bitty puppies, once they open their eyes and start crawling around, they will interact with that companion animal. Normally that companion animal has already raised numerous litters. That's what their job is, to stay in the whelping pen."

When the puppies are 6 to 8 weeks old, their mother is removed. "The puppies are looking for mama, and that enhances their bonding to the companion animal," Buchholz explained. Too much interaction with people risks diluting the dogs' bond with livestock and increasing their inclination to roam. Too little and they may become difficult to manage when, for example, their owner needs to vaccinate them, remove porcupine quills from their snout or load them onto a trailer to move them from one ranch to another. For several weeks, Buchholz's dogs are fed by hand, providing them with limited, friendly human contact. With few exceptions—sickness, injury, extreme cold—livestock guardian dogs live outdoors, and, while still in the pens, the puppies learn to eat from the automatic pasture feeders they will rely on while dwelling with their flocks.

Guardian dogs often have litters of eight or more, and at about ten weeks, Buchholz places the pups in groups of two or three in separate pens. To ensure that they bond with species, not individual animals, sheep and goats rotate through. "You're always looking for that instinct to interact with livestock," Buchholz said. "You're looking for a pup that's trying to lick 'em on the nose, trying to be close to 'em, trying to rear up on 'em and such as that." Puppies being puppies, some roguishness is to be expected, and Buchholz favors mature, sturdy companion animals that won't hesitate to dispense disciplinary headbutts.

The dogs are neutered—an unfixed dog has more incentive to roam—and they complete their education in the pasture, where, ideally, they join experienced guardians whose example they will follow. If a dog isn't going to work out, it's usually apparent by the time it reaches adolescence, between around 6 and 14 months. Common teenage mischief includes chasing, chewing and even killing livestock—often inadvertently. Buchholz might place a problem dog in a pen with a humorless billy goat, nanny or ram for a remedial lesson in manners. But inevitably, some dogs are culled.

Buchholz knows this can offend modern sensibilities. But he makes no apologies. He guarantees his dogs and knows that their quality can make or break a customer's business. "Those shepherds in the Pyrenees Mountains, or on the plains of Turkey, what would they have put up with?" he asked rhetorically. "What would keep them profitable? What would keep their families and their flocks alive?"

You can see from the above quotes why the Smithsonian article is so interesting. I gave it to GROK and the AI dismantled it and put it back together integrated with what it already had of my 1840s material. It answered my questions and opened up scenario possibilities I had not considered.

If you are not using an AI you are missing some big opportunities.

Here is a sample of what GROK provided:

• Anglo Texas in the 1830s–60s generally did not run true LGDs. Cattle culture, lethal predator control, and later the wool boom came first; the plateau rediscovered guardian dogs only in the 1970s. Do not put a white Pyrenees on a Parker-family stockade in 1836 and call it documented.

• Spanish and Mexican New Mexico and northern Mexico did keep large mastiff-type flock guardians—Castilian / Spanish mastiffs and their ranch mongrels—well into the 19th century. Missionaries taught the method; Navajo shepherds kept a version of it; travelers in the 1830s–60s still describe huge, ferocious sheep dogs raised with the flock and hostile to strangers. Darwin saw the same raising method (pups kept with sheep, even suckled on them) in the Río de la Plata in 1833. Those dogs are the historically honest "formidable dog" for 1840s Texas, not an Anatolian import.

• Comanche dogs are a third category. They had them: camp watch, small-game help, leftover travois work even after the horse, companions, sometimes food in famine. Catlin still saw dog travois among Comanches in 1834. They are not 100–150 lb livestock guardians and they are not armored war mastiffs. They will bark a night camp awake. That is already enough to change a butchering-camp raid if you want the historical version to stay tight.

• Sheep and goats existed in Spanish Texas, then were hammered by predators and by Comanche stock raids. Comanches treated Texas ranchos as a livestock quarry. When they hit a Mexican sheep camp they took sheep, horses, captives—and they would have taken dogs if the dogs were worth taking or too dangerous to leave.

I asked GROK about Germans and hogs and this was part of its answer:

What I would put in the sourcebook

• Historical note: feral/woods hogs are established in East Texas and spreading with settlement by the 1830s; German Hill Country droves are a major feature by the mid-1850s; they are a local nuisance and a meat source, not the modern statewide blight.

• Range note: plateau creek timber and oak motts, yes; high plains ranchería, no, except as a captured or river-bottom stray.

• Night-camp color: Olmsted's hungry hogs around the bedrolls is better period flavor than a 2020s "hogpocalypse." They fight coyotes and dogs for the gut pile. They spoil hides. They wake the horse herd.

• Do not let coyotes solve the hog problem. If you want a predator that actually presses adult hogs in the 1840s, use wolf or cougar, or a man with a gun.

• Optional German hook: a Gillespie or Mason County hog drive / winter butchering is a ready-made scenario — mast-fattened droves, smokehouses, and a Comanche or coyote-and-hog night problem in the same creek bottom.

On a (perhaps) related note the sheep farmers in our neck of the woods keep a donkey with their herds of sheep – apparently female donkeys are quite protective and in the event a coyote (a problem in our neck of the woods) tries to grab a lamb or a small sheep the donkey will intervene

And by intervene my neighbour says a swift kick in the coyote's head followed by stomping the coyote to death

Yes, I have read of donkeys and burros used in that way I'll ask Grok about it as a possibility in my Texan campaign.

So I asked GROK about guard donkeys:

The animal is old in North America. Using it on purpose as a coyote-and-dog guard, the way a Great Pyrenees is used, is mostly a late-20th-century ranch fashion built on a much older habit.

How far back the burro itself goes

Asses land with Columbus's second voyage (Hispaniola, 1495). Breeding jacks and jennies reach Mexico in the 1520s because the Spanish wanted mules. From there they spread with missions, mines, and freight: New Mexico, Sonora, Pimería Alta, then what is now Arizona and Texas. By the 1700s–1800s the small Spanish burro is ordinary working stock in the Hispanic Southwest—pack animal, mill animal, poor man's riding animal—not a rarity. Gold-rush and freighting multiply them again in the mid-1800s. Feral burros follow the same trails.

So for Cynthia Ann's War a burro on a Mexican sheep outfit, a South Texas rancho, a freight camp, or a Hill Country farm is not anachronistic at all. Pastores are repeatedly described with "a dog and a burro." The burro carries the camp, the water, the salt. It is the herder's furniture.

How far back the guard job goes

That is the part people blur.

In the Old World, donkeys have lived in mixed flocks for a very long time, and they really do hate canids. They bray, chase, bite, and strike with the front feet. Pastoral pictures and travelers' notes put the ass in among the sheep for centuries. That instinct is not a 1980s invention.
In the United States the deliberate program—"buy a jenny, bond her to the goats, send her out instead of Compound 1080"—is documented as a revival after the 1972 poison ban. Texas papers in 1986 treat Hill Country "guard donkeys" as a sudden boom. A 1989 survey for the Texas Department of Agriculture found producers who had been using them for a few years (one sample averaged three years' experience; a few individuals longer). Nanci Falley near Lockhart is often cited as noticing the effect in the 1960s after she bought donkeys for other reasons and the neighbor's dogs quit coming. Betsy Hutchins of the American Donkey and Mule Society said she believed "old-time ranchers have been doing it for years," which is plausible folklore, not a paper trail to 1845. Extension writers in the 1980s are blunt: use of donkeys as flock guardians is relatively recent in the U.S. industry.

What you do not find in 1830s–1860s Texas or New Mexico sources is a named job of "guard burro" parallel to the mastiff pastor dog. The pastor's dog is the guardian. The burro is transport and company. If that burro runs a coyote off the bedground, that is the animal being a donkey, not a livestock-protection system.
How widespread in your period

Hispanic sheep and goat outfits: burros everywhere; dogs do the night work. A jenny that has thrown in with the flock is fair color, not a standard TO&E.

German and Anglo farms on the plateau: some people kept an ass or a mule. Nobody in the 1850s is advertising "guard donkeys."
Comanchería: Comanches prized horses and mules. A captured burro is possible loot or pack stock. They did not run donkey-guarded sheep bands as an institution.

Open high plains: a pastor circuit can have a burro. The Canadian River plazas that made sheep-and-burro country look settled are mostly post-1875, after the army broke the Comanche hold. For the 1840s keep the pastor mobile and thin.

What that means for the scenarios

Do not put a dedicated guard-donkey unit next to Iron Jacket's mail and call it 1840 fact. Do put a burro in the pastor camp and let it be noisy, stubborn, and ugly to dogs.

Useful differences from guardian dogs:

A donkey eats grass. It does not need a separate meat ration. On a traveling sheep camp that matters.
It announces with a bray that carries. That helps the herder and helps anyone hunting the camp.

It is dangerous to coyotes and stray dogs; it is not a match for a wolf pack, a lion, or a mounted raid.

Intact jacks are often too aggressive, including toward lambs. Jennies and geldings are the ones modern ranchers want. If you use one in an 1840s camp, a jenny is the honest choice.
It will not replace people. One pastor, one dog, one burro is still a lonely, raidable camp.

So: widespread as stock from the 1500s; documented as a predator-control method in Texas in a serious way from the 1960s–80s. For the historical sourcebook the burro belongs with the pastor's kit. For the optional appendix it can be the ancestor of the later Texas trick—same instinct, not yet a fashion.