Posts tagged “Cleo”

352

Posted on 18 December 2017

When Bill and I brought his lambs here on Saturday, it left him with an empty farm for the first time in many years. He figured that his guardian dog, Luna, wouldn’t be very happy with no one to guard, so he brought her, too.

Luna is a maremma, like Bravo, but she’s a little peanut compared to him. While she’s getting used to life at my place, we figured it would be better if she had a real fence keeping her in, so she’s hanging out with one of the cheviot breeding groups for the moment. It also gives her a chance to get comfortable being here before I introduce her to Bravo and Cleo. Luna has worked with other LGDs most of her life, so we’re assuming that she’ll fit in with the gang, but fingers crossed.

She came with her own housing, a well-used calf hutch that the sheep seem more interested in than Luna does.

Luna has taken more of an early liking to me than I expected, since she’s 8 years old and very used to Bill. She has the same guardian-dog lean that Bravo does, but she catches me at knee level, while Bravo tries to take me out at the hip. She’ll be with us for about 6 months, and I’m really looking forward to getting to know her.

Categories: Bravo, Dogs, livestock guardian dogs

Tagged: Bill Fosher, bravo, calf hutch, Cleo, livestock guardian dog, Luna, maremma

345

Posted on 11 December 2017

When I went out to check on the lambs this morning, the fence energizer was giving a baleful red blink, and the fence was cold as the snow.

I’d been worried about the state of the battery, what with cold and the limited sunlight on the solar panel; its charge level had been creeping down over the last few weeks, though there were still enough electrons inside to keep the fence live — until this morning. There’s nothing like a non-electrified electric fence to make me thankful (in no particular order):

Neither the lambs nor the dogs had yet tested the fence and discovered that it no longer had a bite;
The local coyotes didn’t choose last night to indulge their taste for lamb;
My second fence energizer was sitting in the barn, since all the other electronet enclosures are tapped off the main fence, and I was able to borrow its battery; and
I decided some time earlier this year that it would be prudent to have a battery charger on the farm.

I’m sometimes alarmed at all the various devices and machines that I already depend on to run my operation. I’ve been lucky that not much has broken down so far, but I’m acutely aware of all the fixit skills I need to acquire.

Categories: fence, lamb

Tagged: battery, bravo, charger, Cleo, dead battery, electronet, fence, fence energizer, lambs, solar energizer, uh-oh

329

Posted on 25 November 2017

Bravo arrived almost exactly a year ago, 11 months old and a bit of a wild child. I’ve worked hard on helping him to calm down (minimal success) and teaching him some manners (moderate success). He’s now very good at sitting before he gets a meal, and he sometimes remembers that I want him to sit before I’ll give him attention. He still insists on peeing on anything of value, including his food bowl, the sheep water, and especially any new hay. I’ve worked hardest on trying to convince him not to jump on me, as he is tall and strong enough to take me down (based on firsthand experience); this in particular seems to be a hard thing for him to learn, e.g., from the other night:

His antics mostly don’t endear him to the sheep, though they are not so afraid of his as they were at first. Cleo, on the other hand, has won their trust.

I’m trying hard not to be like my second grade teacher, who often expressed frustration that little girls were so nice, and why couldn’t the little boys be more like them? People have warned me that Bravo probably still has another year of idiocy in him before he starts to grow up; I hope they’re right that it’s only a year, and that it’s a fast one.

Categories: Bravo, Cleo, Dogs, sheep

Tagged: bravo, Cleo, Great Pyrenees, growing up, idiocy, immature, jumping, livestock guardian dog, maremma, peeing

324

Posted on 20 November 2017

When I picked Cleo up at the end of May from her previous farm, her caretaker there reported that she was rather diffident about food. As advertised, she wouldn’t touch a bite of her breakfast or dinner for her first four days here. She was a bit on the chubby side, so Bill encouraged me to ride out her hunger strike — offer her food and then take it away after a few minutes if she didn’t eat. And Bravo was all too happy to eat anything she didn’t want. She gradually warmed to food, first tentatively and now with great enthusiasm.

If Bravo tries to encroach these days, he faces a mortal battle from Cleo, so he’s learning to keep his distance

There’s a trope that people come to resemble their dogs in appearance (and vice versa) that I think (hope) is a lot of hooey. I’m less sure about behavioral convergence, though. I’ve heard stories about people who leave a bowl of food out for their dog all day, and ¾ of it is still left in the evening; this baffles me. Anyone who has shared a meal with me knows I will be acutely distracted if even a morsel of food remains uneaten on my plate or any other within reach, and every dog I’ve ever lived with behaves the same way. Of course I think this is only normal, for a dog or a farm boy, but I wonder if I have my thumb on the scale.

Categories: Cleo, Dogs

Tagged: behavioral convergence, breakfast, Cleo, converging appearance, diffident, dinner, Dogs, hungry, obsession

305

Posted on 1 November 2017

I have a nice vantage point looking over the lower pasture where the main flock is grazing these days.

I photographed the flock early this morning, before I moved them to fresh pasture, and the frosty start put the grazed and ungrazed areas into high relief. The brighter green area in the middle of their enclosure is newly sprouted stinging nettle, providing one small frustration in an otherwise idyllic scene: I’ve struggled to control the dense stands of nettle in this field, and I was hoping the sheep might eat the fresh young growth (I’ve heard that other people’s sheep do eat it), but they weren’t interested at all. I suppose if I left them in there for 2 or 3 more days they might nibble it in desperation, but only after every last blade of grass had been chewed out of existence. I guess nettle control strategies will roll over onto next year’s to-do list.

(I’m not sure why counting sheep has acquired sleep-inducing connotations. Getting an accurate tally of a constantly-moving collection of nearly identical white creatures feels a lot like a panic attack to me, particularly if I really need to know the number. I was quietly pleased that the miracle of digital photography rendered them eminently countable, and doubly pleased to confirm that I still have 64 sheep in this group.)

Categories: Dogs, grazing, sheep

Tagged: bravo, Cleo, counting, deception, flock, frosty morning, fucking nettle, proclivities, sheep, stinging nettle

302

Posted on 29 October 2017

I’m surprised at how happy I am to have the entire flock back at my place. Part of it is certainly a logistical relief, that I can walk outside and quickly get a sense of whether anything has gone seriously wrong, but there’s a less tangible part as well, a sense of completeness when the animals are nearby. Maybe I am becoming a shepherd.

We got about 48 hours respite from the rain, but now it’s back in earnest.

I tried to convince Cleo and the ewes that it wasn’t my fault, but I’m not sure they believed me. I set them up for the night on a hillside in the lee of the wind, so they’ll have a bit of protection; I’ll try to resist the urge to apologize in the morning.

Categories: Dogs, pasture, sheep

Tagged: Cleo, ewes, flock, fuck you, livestock guardian dog, pasture, rain, sheep, wet

289

Posted on 16 October 2017

It’s been exactly a month since I moved the flock to the Woodbury place, and for the longest time the pasture felt infinite, a big square field that swallowed up my sheep. It’s still a big field, but the uneaten portion of it is shrinking by the day, and I’m suddenly anxious whether the grass will last until the move on Saturday.

The bit between the flock and the barn in the upper is all that’s left, and I’m hoping we can squeeze five more days of grazing out of it. The grass is very lush in the lower part of the field, but the farmhouse and barn at the end of the pasture look awfully close from the sheeps’ point of view.

The sheep, bless them, are utterly unaware that the gas gauge is close to E, and are as enthusiastic as ever moving to the next grazing area.

Categories: grazing, pasture, sheep

Tagged: almost done, big field, bravo, Cleo, grazing, pasture, running on empty, sheep, shitting bricks, Woodbury

287

Posted on 14 October 2017

I’ve become sufficiently complacent about Bravo and Cleo’s livestock guarding abilities that I imagine all the sheep predators have left Sullivan (or at least our parts of it). So I was surprised this morning when we arrived at the Woodbury place, and Cass and Luc immediately went into their predator-tracking mode, carefully and deliberately following scent trails in the grass. I hadn’t seen this behavior in a while, so I didn’t entirely trust my interpretation, but as we got close to the flock, there was a sign that even I could pick up —

fresh canid scat on a prominent spot in the middle of the pasture. I’ve often seen coyote scat on top of a rock in the middle of a trail, placed for maximum territorial announcement; this was in the right place, but seemed a little small for coyote, so I assume a fox was visiting the flock last night. This is the same rock where sheep had trampled sensitive fern two days earlier, and still very close to the flock.

I’m assuming that a fox would have a hard time killing any of my sheep at this point (expect perhaps the tiny triplet lamb that refuses to grow), but foxes can certainly take newborn lambs. I’m thinking that the big white dogs made quite a ruckus last night, so it’s surprising that the fox got as close as it did.

Cass and Luc were disappointed to be late to the party, but ready to take on any future threats.

Categories: Dogs, pasture, scat

Tagged: border collies, bravo, Cass, Cleo, fox, glacial erratic, livestock guardian dogs, Luc, pasture, predator, scat, scent trail, sheep

271

Posted on 28 September 2017

A little over 100 years after its first formulations, quantum mechanics is getting trendy, popping up in social science and the arts. The gratuitous references and gobbledegook that result make me very grouchy, but perhaps I need to fight fire with fire. This, therefore, is the inaugural post in my new series Quantum Mechanics and the Modern Shepherd.

One formulation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle asserts that the act of making a measurement inevitably changes the thing being measured. Werner Heisenberg was describing the characteristics of fundamental particles like electrons, but his principle is equally applicable to livestock guardian dogs.

Bravo and Cleo are typically wrestling whenever I see them, but Chip and Kathy Woodbury, whose house overlooks our current pasture, have told me that this behavior vanishes as soon as I’m gone — the big fluffy dogs immediately go back to watchful guarding. The shepherd, by observing his dogs, fundamentally changes their behavior, and therefore can never gain firsthand knowledge of his guardians. In future experiments, I will determine whether sheep are fundamentally unknowable as well.

Categories: Dogs, physics, sheep

Tagged: art, bravo, bunk, Cleo, gratuitous, livestock guardian dogs, physics, shepherd, social sciences, Uncertainty Principle, Werner Heisenberg

251

Posted on 8 September 2017

I thought I was going to do quick morning chores today and then head in to Boston to participate in my other life, but I got to Eric and Deb’s place and found Bravo frantically rubbing his face in the dirt. He and Cleo had confronted a porcupine some time over night and neither were very happy. Cleo, the gentler soul, let me both photograph her and stayed calm while I pulled out her quills.

Moments after I had pulled the last one, she returned to her posing rock.

Bravo was not so phlegmatic about his predicament. I managed to pull a couple of quills, but he would thrash about for five minutes after each removal; he was much more thoroughly decorated than Cleo, and at the rate of one quill every five minutes, I figured we’d be at it for 14 hours. With the help of my friend and frequent rescuer Wendy Pelletier, we loaded him into her car* and drove 30 minutes to the veterinary clinic. Through the magic of modern sedation, the vet was able to get him sorted in just a few minutes, and by this evening, he was seemingly back to normal.

I’m still unsure how a porcupine got into the sheep enclosure in the first place, since (now that my ground wire is connected) I’ve got better than 4000 volts on the fence. I can only imagine that he climbed one of the trees overhanging the field and dropped in for a visit, though I’m not sure what the appeal might have been. I’m also unsure how he got out, as there were no trees to facilitate his escape; perhaps with two guardian dogs paying attention to him, the fence voltage seemed like less of a concern. I half expected to find a porcupine carcass in the field, but I only saw some suggestive bits in the area where the encounter must have occurred.

Now I’m wondering what lessons might have been learned. I’d like to believe that this family of porcupines might have developed a strong negative association with sheep. I’m less hopeful that Bravo and Cleo will choose a different path if they encounter another walking pincushion.

_______

*I know I said that Bravo doesn’t ride inside, but these seemed like extenuating circumstances. To keep him from causing any more havoc on the way to the vet, I rode in back with him, hanging on to his leash and trying not to get stuck by any of his quills.

Categories: Dogs

Tagged: bloody nose, bravo, Cleo, electonet, idiots, livestock guardian dogs, pasture, porcupine, quills, sheep

Travels with Musti

Dogs, nature, photography, and the meaning of life, with apologies to J.S.