A recent discussion popped up on Facebook this morning in which a member of a homesteading group bragged about what a good livestock guardian and hunting dog his Labrador was. This post got posted in a livestock guardian breed group, which resulted in much, much eye-rolling.
It is certainly true that there are dogs that make excellent livestock guardian dogs that aren’t of the typical breeds. Mark Derr has written extensively about the mongrel dogs of the Navajo that guard their sheep, but within those dogs, there is quite a bit of variance about which ones are good at the task and which ones would rather go roaming and hunting.
The breeds that have undergone selection for this work are much more likely to be successful. All these breeds have been selected for high defense drive and low prey drive. Little lambs can go jumping around these dogs, and their instinct to hunt and kill prey will not be stimulated.
Most dogs bred in the West are bred for the opposite behaviors. The most popular breeds are usually from the gun dog and herding groups, and those breeds tend to have been selected for relatively high prey drive. Those dogs are much more likely to engage in predatory behavior towards them.
Further, breeds like Labradors are bred to have low defense drive. Labradors are very rarely good guard dogs. They have been bred to fit in the British shooting scene where they would regularly be exposed to other dogs and strangers, and these dogs have had much of their territorial and status-based aggression bred out of them. If the coyote shows up to a farm guarded by a Labrador, chances are very high that the Labrador will try to play with the coyote. It might bark at the coyote and intimidate the predator as well, but there aren’t many Labradors that are going to fight a coyote that comes menacing the flock.
The poster with the LGD Labrador claimed that Labradors were great herding dogs. When pressed on this point, he posted a photo of some yellow dogs moving a herd of beef cattle. These dogs weren’t Labradors. They were blackmouth curs, a breed that can superficially look like a Labrador, but it is a hunting and herding breed that is quite common parts of the South and Texas. You could in theory train a Labrador to herd sheep, but I doubt you could ever train one to herd cattle. And the herding behavior would be far substandard to a breed actually bred for it.
The poster claimed that Labradors were “bred down from Newfoundlands,” and Newfoundlands are livestock guardians. The problem with this statement is that it is totally false. As I’ve noted many times on the blog, the big Newfoundland dog was actually bred up from the St. John’s water dog. Every genetic study on breed evolution, clearly puts this breed with the retrievers. This dog was mostly created for the British and American pet market, but it is a very large type of retriever.
And contrary to what I have written on this blog, it is now clear that retrievers and Newfoundlands are not an offshoot of the livestock guardian breeds. A limited genetic study that also found Middle Eastern origins for all dogs had this finding, but a more complete genetic study found that retrievers and the Newfoundlad are actually a divergent form of gundog.
I have not written much about this study, but it does change some of my retriever history posts. It turns out that Irish water spaniels are also retrievers and are very closely related to the curly-coated retrievers. It has been suggested that curly-coated retrievers are actually older than the St. John’s water dog imports, but conventional breed history holds that they are crosses between St. John’s water dogs and some form of water spaniel. It may actually be that something like a curly-coated retriever is the ancestor of the St. John’s water dog, and this dog would have been called a “water spaniel.” I have not worked this one out yet. The dogs we call Newfoundland dogs, though, are much more closely related to the Labrador, flat-coated, and golden retrievers than to the curly-coated retriever and the Irish water spaniel. Thus, the Labrador and the Newfoundland dog are cousins, but the Labrador is not “bred down from the Newfoundland.”
The other clue that Newfoundland dogs and their kin aren’t good LGDs is that in Newfoundland, the sheep industry was actually severely retarded by the dogs. Fishermen let their dogs roam the countryside, and any time someone set out a flock of sheep, the water dogs, which I would call St. John’s water dogs, would descend upon the flocks and savage them.
So the natural history of the Labrador totally conflicts with its likely ability to be a good livestock guardian. The British bred these dogs to be extremely social, and their prey drive has been selected for. They also have this entire history in which their ancestors went out hunting for their own food, which means they do have the capacity to become sheep hunting dogs.
The poster didn’t appreciate when these facts were pointed out. The response was that the other people were racist for saying that Labrador isn’t likely to be a good LGD, especially a Labrador that has been used for hunting.
This is problematic because dog breeds are not equivalent to human races. Human races are just naturally occurring variations that have evolved in our species as we have spread across the globe. Most of these differences are superficial, and none are such that it would justify any racial discrimination in law or policy.
Dog breeds, however, have been selectively bred for characteristics. The eugenics movement, the Nazis, and the slaveholders who selectively bred slaves are the only people who have engaged in the selective breeding of people. And all these periods in history have lasted only a very short time before they were deemed to be gross violations of human rights.
For some reason, people have a hard time accepting these facts about dogs, but the very same people often have no problem with an analogy with livestock.
If I want high milk yields, I will not buy Angus cattle. If I want marbled beef, I won’t buy Holsteins. If I want ducks to lay lots of eggs, I wouldn’t get Pekins, which will lay about 75 eggs a year. I would get Welsh harlequins, which might lay 280 a year. But they don’t get very big, and their meat yields are very low.
Angus cattle and Holsteins are the same species. Welsh harlequins and Pekins are too. But they have been selected for different traits.
Dogs have undergone similar selection. A Labrador retriever has its own history. So does a Central Asian shepherd.
Accepting that these dogs have different traits does not make one a racist. It merely means that one respects the truth of selective breeding.
And that’s why a Labrador isn’t really a good LGD.
My LGDs and I THANK YOU.
Not that the updated chart is infallible. I mean what is up with the GSD? I’m thinking that result is what you get with introducing Chinooks to the study when its a very recent cross between arctic and working dogs.
But with the issue of Labs and LGDs, its also an issue of degree, especially when we start talking about small farms or modern homesteading. My retriever was very effective in keeping the cats and raccoons out of the chickens. Of course, that is an entirely different task than keeping wolves off free roaming sheep, so you have very different dogs doing superficially similar things, in entirely different places. With the rise of these small farms I think there is room for a smaller LGD to keep small critters out of the chickens and dwarf goats where even a Maremma is an expensive to feed overkill.
I think the issue with GSD is that they probably were used to create the modern Xolo. Xolos have never been shown to have pre-Columbian DNA, beyond that we know that the hairless trait originated in Mexico. So I think they simply grafted it onto GSD or GSD type stock. GSD also really do well in wild village dog populations, so that could be going on too.
Also, the Eurasier thing has me a bit baffled because it’s not grouping near the three known component breeds.
The original sized of Xolo was the Intermediate/Miniature. It is a very sore point among many breeders in Mexico about ‘certain unethical kennels’ using other breeds to size up the larger ‘Standards’.
What you’re describing is a farm not, not an LGD. It’s not possible for a smaller breed to be an LGD. A dog doesn’t become an LGD because it chases a cat or a raccoon. LGDs are specific breeds which, as Scottie points out, have hundreds and even thousands of years of selective breeding for a multitude of traits that are simply not found in dogs that are not selected for them. Low prey drive is the most obvious example. There is literally no other job other than perhaps being a modern pet for which low prey drive is so important and for which low prey drive has been so stringently selected for.
Also the size of your stock has nothing to do with whether or not you’re going to be dealing with large predators. What is a Lab going to do if a pack of stray pet dogs comes along and decides killing chickens looks like fun? If he even has the territorial aggression to run them off instead of making friends with them (something that Labs are NOT supposed to have and which is selected AGAINST in good Labrador breeding), he is not going to fare well in a pitched battle. He doesn’t have the power, the grit, and the build to fight something tough without getting seriously beaten up himself. General farm dogs have their place, but there is a reason no one anywhere has developed a medium sized LGD. They are all large to giant in size for a very good reason.
Brilliant
In ‘The Truth About Dogs’, Stephen Budiansky claimed that livestock guardian dogs can throw wolves off their hunting routine by trying to play with them. If I recall correctly, this keeps interrupting the hard-wired hunting sequence, leading in the wolf giving up in frustration.
I have no personal knowledge in this field, but if Budiansky is right, it strikes me that a friendly Labrador might be able to keep coyotes from preying on sheep, just by being too big to summarily kill, too pacific to respond to the first cues of a territorial aggression fight, and too distracting to ignore. The poor coyotes have no social roadmap on how to respond to such weirdness, so they leave to hunt somewhere else.
Like I said, all I know is from books, so this may be completely wrong. I just thought I’d put it out there. :-)
It’s possible that a friendly playful dog could put a wolf off its hunt, but for canids and most predators hunting is fun stuff.
LGDs aren’t playful with wolves or coyotes. They range from aggressive to extremely aggressive towards strange canines and other predators.
No LGD worth his salt would play with a wolf. If one did, the owner would be extremely disappointed and upset. Definitely not an LGD trait. LGDS are usually strange dog or canine aggressive.
I remember reading that wolves and LGDs in Europe were in fact crossbreeding, producing pups from LGD bitches with wolf blood and pups from wolf bitches having LGD blood.
I read something about Turkish shepherd dogs (I can’t remember which breed), but when dogs and wolves cross, it produces an animal that is very dangerous in Turkey. But when this animal gets bred by a dog, the 3/4 dog 1/4 are suitable to use as LGDs. I assume that’s what happens in Georgia, where that study happened.
https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article/105/3/345/2960052/Gene-Flow-between-Wolf-and-Shepherd-Dog
Traditional shepherds severely cull their litters and generally only raise 4-5 pups. Any adult dog that does not behave correctly is also culled. Turkish Shepherds expect aggressive reactions to wolves.
Great article! I’m sure you’ll get slammed for your “racist” use of actual facts, but my real LGDs and I thank you!
As usual, intelligent, informative, helpful, and thought provoking commentary.
Pretty sure this was the post where I was called a racist :D. Thanks for the article!
Spending an hour or two with my 11-month-old Anatolian LGD — even with her being a runty female at only ~90 lbs — would disabuse such a person of the notion that their lab is anywhere near as cognitively and physically equipped to guard livestock as a one of these Turkish dogs.
These are hard dogs, with an independent, sort of wolfish intelligence that is very different than a lab.
She sure is sweet with kids, though. :-)
How refreshing to read this post. I have read and followed many of your posts over the years in my research and writing my book, Meet Your Dog – The Game-changing Guide to Understanding Your Dog’s Behavior, which will be out this February. The book, bound to trigger the same reactions and accusations you report here, frankly addresses this matter as it categorizes dogs into their working ancestry as it advises modern owners in the inherent differences in living with them. If we don’t all get real about the whole picture of our dogs behavior, we will continue to fail them, sadly believing all too often they are failing us as they face impossible expectations.
Thank you for being willing to be part of that conversation!