Since Bravo’s ear-chewing, ewe-chasing, lamb-eating crisis, he seems to have turned a corner in his development as a guardian dog.  After the incident with the lamb, I tied him off to the fence for a week until I was sure there were no ewes left in the pasture who might lamb.  Then he went on parole, dragging a tire around for a couple weeks to discourage him from chasing sheep; and finally free again when he’d seemed to burn through his adolescent idiocy.  It’s now been about two weeks that he’s been unencumbered, and a real shift seems to be taking place.  The sheep are much less skittish around him, so he’s not giving them cause to be afraid.  Then I noticed that he spent the storm huddled with the flock rather than in his dog house.  Now he’s spending his days alongside the sheep acting like a grown-up guardian.

He’s serene until something catches his attention, and then he lets loose with his voice-of-god bark.  In this case, I set him off by taking a step to the left while standing 400 yards downhill from him.