"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.