02/27/08 Doctor Dog

Dog gone if this isn't a new twist on an old practice. I'm Jeff Keane; I'll be back right after this with what's new. I don't know if you can teach an old dog new tricks, but it sure seems like you can teach young dogs a little different slant on an old job. Livestock protection dogs have been used in Europe for centuries. More recently, they have been used in the United States primarily to protect sheep from predators. An article in the Angus Beef Bulletin by Ed Haag related the new study being conducted to train these dogs to protect cattle from whitetail deer in northeast Michigan. You wouldn't think cattle would need protection from deer, but these deer carry a strain of bovine tuberculosis that can be transferred to cattle through feed contamination and aerosol transmission. Other deer deterrents such as scarecrows, propane cannons, horns and lasers didn't prove to be long-term solutions. Fencing was costly and undesirable. The experiment used four Great Pyrenees pups that were bonded to cattle by treating the cattle and dogs as littermates. The dogs and their "herd" were then placed in three acre pastures within deer game farms containing deer concentration six to fifteen times higher than normally found in the wild. The guard dogs performed very well as they were 100 percent effective keeping deer out of the core area of the pastures, 99 percent effective denying deer access to cattle feed and 69 percent effective keeping deer out of pasture totally. New dogs, new tricks  no problem. I'm Jeff Keane.