As I have started a new english language blog (see the side bar),
I will not be posting any new stories here any more.
 I post regularly onto this blog and  you can read about our dogs, other animals and ranch adverntures there.

The link to the blog is:
http://predator-friendly-ranching.blogspot.com/

So come and visit us there and leave a message in the comments section!

Sarplaninac Sully is looking for a new home and he found it!
Thanks to all who responded, Sully will be living in Southern Alberta on a cattle ranch from now on.

JUST TO BE CLEAR:
SULLY IS NOT ONE OF MY DOGS. I HAVE OFFERED TO HELP HIS OWNER TO FIND A NEW HOME FOR HIM. FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT HIM PLEASE CONTACT HER DIRECTLY.

 He is a year old and an intact male. Due to personal reasons Sully needs a new home. Sully is a registered Sarplaninac. He is not available for free.

To give you a little more background on Sully, he is a very good natured dog. He grew up on a farm for the first 5 months with his Breeder in Manitoba. He loves to be outdoors most of the time. He will come in the house for some family time, but prefers to be outside. He is great with all animals, children and people. Has never shown any aggression towards anything and would be the first to submit. I have 2 young children and 2 cats. He is very well socialized with other dogs of all sizes and ages and loves to play.  He is very smart and learns fast.  Sully is leash trained and likes the water but hasn’t been brave enough to go all the way in quite yet. He does like to steal shoes from time to time, but doesn’t chew them, he just piles them in the living room. He would make a great dog for families and farms. He does need a lot of space because of his size, but is also quite content to curl up in a corner and snooze. Sully weighs 110lbs.

He isn’t really fully aware of his own size yet, so he needs a lot of space to play and some positive reinforcement training. He always wants to please and is affectionate. 

He is unsure about new situations and might try to shy away, but with patience and reassurance, he responds well. Sarplaninac’s are guardian dogs and will alert you by barking at anything unusual.  Sully has never shown any aggression and is submissive. He likes to play, have fun & sleep.

As the sarplaninac is a rare breed there are not very many books written about this breed, and certainly very few in the english language! A long time breeder and jugde of sarplaninac, Vladimir Krstevski has written a book about this breed.
This is a book the focuses  on the breed.
The author descibes the various name changes and breed standards that the sarplaninac has gone through. He emphasis the working guardian dog and has added many pictures of various types of sarplaninac in this book.
 Some historical and cultural information about this Balkan region contributes to a better understanding about the history of this pastoral breed. The book is written in three languages, English being one.

To order this book, please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Both Herman and Lilly have found new homes. Herman has moved on to guard sheep near Barrhead. Here is a note I recently received from his new owners:
Herman is very much at home now.  I should take the camera and get a few photos of him with the ewe lambs.  He is very good around them. He lays around the feed bunks with them and lays around with them.  We like him very much. If you are ever by this way, feel welcome to stop by and see Herman.  I am glad we have him.

And, Lilly made a long road trip to her new home and family in Manitoba.



Here are some pictures of Lilly out for a walk with Kayleigh and me.   Since we brought her home we've been walking the perimeter of the property every morning so that she would figure out where her boundaries are.  She is such a sweet dog and we've had plenty of company so everyone could meet her! She is so great with the toddlers also!  She really seemed to like our 2 year old nephew as they both wanted to explore similar things I guess! She had a face-off with a moose about 3 days ago....she barked at the moose and the moose just stared at us.  Finally, the moose left but I was surprised at how confident Lilly was the whole time. Anyway, just thought I'd drop you a note to say we're all getting along just great!

Thank you both for taking a chance on these two pups. Even though I had the confidence that both are wonderful dogs, you took the plunge and did it! I look forward to following the progress of both dogs!

This is the story of Herman and Lilly.

Herman and Lilly are two 9 month old sarplaninac pups that we bred.
They were sold to a veterinarian who wanted them to guard his stock.
Last week I got a phone call from the Tails to Tell, a no kill, animal shelter  near Calgary.
They mentioned that two great pyranees dogs had been picked up in the area and where at the shelter. 
According to their microchip information they were bred by me.
After the initial shock and confusion, I realised that this was about Herman and Lilly.
The shelter informed me that the dogs had been found wondering and that the veterinarian owner did not want them back and threatened to harm them if he had to take them back. This man also refused to sign the dogs over to the shelter and stormed out of the building saying that he would  deny ownership if the shelter would press on with this issue.
This left the shelter with a problem as they were not able to rehome the dogs until they were transferrred to the shelter.
When the shelter contacted me I informed them that I would take these two pups back, and try to find suitable homes for them.
This week we collected Herman and Lilly (as a foster home, until the legal issues can be resolved) and brought them back to High Prairie.

The owner never once contacted me about any problems or dissatisfaction with these two dogs, if he had done that we could have come to a resolution without having these dogs abandoned in a shelter!

So, now we have these two back here with us in High Prairie. They are friendly pups and do not seem to have any major issues.

Herman is a big boy, karabash in color (that is a blond coat with black mask on his face). He has been neutered. He was with the ewes and lambs today and showed appropriate behavior to them. He was somewhat boisterous in the beginning but soon settled down, smelling the ewes and lambs and meeting Snowy and Katcha.

Lilly is more standoffish and shyer, she is smaller than Herman, iron grey in color and has been spayed.
Her initial reaction to the sheep was less appropriate, she was nervous, looking for a way out of the sheep pasture and did not settle to well.

I will be looking for appropriate places for these two 9 month old pups.
Herman may have a place to go as a guardian dog.
Lilly will be needing a new family and home.
If anyone knows of someone looking for a med to large size, sarplaninac bitch, then please feel free to contact me about her.
She is friendly and I would like to place her in a "pet" home as soon as possible.
She is registered however I do not have the registration papers as they were sent to the owner and I doubt if he will send them to me.
She is fully vaccinated, spayed, microchipped. She will be dewormed here before she goes again.
Lilly will make a wonderful family dog as she is faily obedient, walks well on the leash, likes my kids and seems fairly sociable to other dogs.

Sometimes survival depends on not being noticed:

However if you are a livestock guardian dog,
you too want the element of surprise...

What do they say about a wolf in sheeps' clothing??

Fena is one of our most unobtrusive dogs.
She is not a "in your face" kind of dog.
She does not demand attention.
She is never the first one at the food nor looking for attention.
She really does not mind to hang back and wait.
She can be somewhat introvert and reserved.

She has a number of qualities that I really admire.
She is wise, alert, aggressive, gentle and kind.
She can balance these qualities in a subtle way.
She can spot a coyote at half a mile, in tall grass and will react quickly and very aggressively to it,
yet she can be calm and gentle when needed.

Our lambing has started again:

Fena is always lying somewhere in the vacinity of a ewe lambing.
She is unobtrusive and does not disturb the ewe at all.

Sometimes she will amble over to the ewe and the newborn lambs, gently sniff them and lick them together with the ewe.
She will back off from a nervous ewe and her movements are nice and calm.

 

But most often she will just watch over them...

Alaska is a clever dog. She is very resourcefull and can be a challenge at times..
She figured out that she could crawl under the fence, through a hole that a rabbit would battle to get through..
Her reward was of course freedom.
After two escapes, I needed a plan.
I kept her chained until I could solve the problem.
I constructed a " anti crawl device", something many goat farmers use.

 
After some frustration and many attempts she gave up trying to sqeeze through the hole.
As she is clever, she figured out that maybe the hole was too small and she needed to  dig it out bigger..
I solved that by running a hot wire over the hole..


And now she stays in!
Never mind, being smarter than a 5th grader,
try outsmarting a livestock guardian dog!

It took two years before we lost a sheep to a predator. Last weekend, a big Suffolk ewe was killed and eaten by a predator.
We had noticed that there were a lot of predators around and that they were very active. With a wolf been spotted regularly on our, and neighboring farms, we decided to increase the number of guard dogs we have with the flock.

During the day the flock (about 650 ewes) go out and graze in the bush. The bush is thick and the dogs need to cover a full quarter section.  As we were not always sure that we managed to gather every sheep out of the bush at night we decided to leave the dogs in this area to guard any sheep left behind and to keep this area clear of predators at night. We would put in three adult dogs and two pups during the day.

Every evening I go out to the bush and gather the sheep and bring them home to a night field of about 12 acres. As most of the dogs stay behind in the bush, I only would leave Fena and pup Wolf in with the sheep at night. Fena is now 2.5 years old and Wolf is 7 months.
On Sunday morning I went out to the ewes to take them to the bush, I noticed that things were a bit out of place, some ravens flew up out of the field. As I got to the pasture, I saw Fena lying guarding a carcass of a dead sheep. When I called she did not get up and come to me.

I walked into the field and went over to her, she was so exhausted,  she could not get up. She was stiff and could hardly walk. I helped her up and went and checked on the sheep. This was a big Suffolk ewe, she was complete eaten, just the bones and hide were left. The carcass had been dragged about 60ft through the field.



We are not sure what had killed this sheep. It could have been wolves (as our neighbor is losing calves to wolves now), a pack of coyotes, that had just exhausted the dog so much until they could kill and eat the sheep or  as someone local suggested, possibly a cougar.

I could not see tracks in the pasture but did find bear, wolf and coyote tracks further away in another area of our farm.

In hindsight I should have known that one dog and a pup could not deal with the predator load we have here. Every night I now bring in all the dogs from the bush and place them with the flock.

After a days rest Fena was up and about and doing her thing.
The dogs are super alert and very vigilant the last few days.
They are active in patrolling, placing themselves around the flock.

We now realize that one dog is certainly no match for the predators here and we are very lucky that Fena and the pup were not killed.

August 2010,
White wolf

We live in an area where we have a lot of predators. We have all the big predators here, coyotes, wolves, bears and mountain lion. The mountain lion we have not seen however we hear regular reports about them. Our farm borders crown land and we see a lot of game here such as moose and deer. The wildlife and nature was one of the reasons for us to choose Canada as our new home. We realized that if we wanted to run a sheep farm in this area we would need to look into methods and ways to be able to reduce livestock predation. We brought our Sarplaninac livestock guardian dogs with us from Europe, Invested in good fences, bring our livestock into a night corral closer to home and the big dogs are our mail line of defense. Up until now this seems to be working well as we have not lossed a sheep to a predator yet. We did rapidly up our big dog numbers as we felt that 3 where not enough, certainly when also dealing with wolf packs. We have 10 dogs now of various ages.

Last summer we had a grey wolf frequently on our farm. This summer we have had a few up close encounters with a big white wolf. At haying time this wolf came an watched us making hay, it was late in the evening when he pitched up and spent about 10 minutes watching us. I managed to take a poor low light picture of him.

 
A few weeks later, I was baling hay on our farm when this same wolf comes trotting down the pasture. This was at about 9am in broad daylight. He was within our fence(which is a 6 foot high bison fence), going through the pasture.

Two weeks back he was back in the pasture, our daughter Jess saw him and thought that it was our dog Beli, however when she checked the sheep Beli was standing at the sheep. So she took off with the gator and chased the wolf away.

Do to these encounters we decided that we would leave the Sarplaninac in the bush pasture also at night when the sheep come home. # dogs stay out in the bush and the rest go to the night corrals with the ewes.

Our new pup Katcha arrived from the Czech Republic. She and another pup Vuk, from the States have now moved from the sheep barn to the ram pen to continue on with their training with the livestock. Katch seems to have found her place in amoungst the “big” dogs and “Big” Sheep. She has that wonderfull Far away look about her. She likes to watch and oberserve what is going on.

Having dinner with your buddies is always a nice way to spend some time,
however some buddies can be some what irritating at times, especially when they insist on picking at your food while you are trying to enjoy your meal.
They just have no respect for you personal space.

Here is Beli enjoying his meal with his buddies:

Here is Fena, she has some of those irritating buddies:

Sometimes one needs to demand some personal space,
here are two sheep fighting for their space:

 And others don't fight, they just push and shove:

A family of foxes have decided to make our hay yard home. It has everything a fox might need, plenty of mice in the bales, passageways between the bales, warmth, shade, shelter, water close by with our big dugout about 200m away. But, most importantly is offers protection to the fox family. Inadvertently, these foxes have protection from the wolves and coyotes, our sarplaninac dogs help keep them safe, from these large predators. That is, not because our dogs have taken a liking to foxes, but because of the pasture layout.


Our hay yard is behind our house and yard, behind the hay yard is a fence and behind the fence are the pastures for the sheep. The sarplaninac are in all the pastures with the sheep and have no access to the hay yard area. The wolves or coyotes will first have to go through the pastures with the dogs, then over the fence to get to the foxes and this just does not happen. So, this family of foxes lives in relative safety.
 
Now, our dogs are not really particularly fond of foxes, in fact Alaska hates them with a passion.
She tries all sorts of tricks to try to get them into her pasture so she can get to them. She will stop barking at them, lower her head and wag her tail in a friendly manner to entice them to stick their head through the fence so she can grab them! She places her meat near the fence and then lies and watches from behind a bale to see if the food will work, but up to now no success! These foxes, 4 in total are also living about 50m away from our free range chickens, the foxes have left the chickens alone, however I am sure that one day these foxes will discover our hens...

    

I have decided that they need to find a new home in the woods. In about a week or two the fencing guys will be done (they are also camping in the hay yard, together with the foxes) and then I will set up some electric nets and fence off the hay yard and place Alaska in here to encourage the foxes to move on and find a new home elsewhere.

That was never needed, the foxes decided themselves to move back into the woods. They never killed one free range chicken here!