Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Black-headed Dorpers might be better adapted to the SoCal climate, but I imagine it would take some trial and error to discover which do best against local predators. (I can't see 'em using flock guardian dogs; there are too many nutjobs.)
Or do the sensible thing and invite the big migratory commercial herds back. They PAY to graze, ya know.
I can't imagine any breed of sheep doing well against cougars or coyotes. I have very non-nutjob LGD's but they have an annoying tendency to bark a lot at night and if the sheep were clearing suburban brush the neighbors would have a cow. Donkeys and llamas sometimes work. Electric fence and fladry are helpful too as well as keeping them contained.
I can't imagine any breed of sheep doing well against cougars or coyotes. I have very non-nutjob LGD's but they have an annoying tendency to bark a lot at night and if the sheep were clearing suburban brush the neighbors would have a cow. Donkeys and llamas sometimes work. Electric fence and fladry are helpful too as well as keeping them contained.
Funny how people apparently would rather have their house burn down than put up with sheep.
You can't really electric-fence the rugged semi-wilderness that surrounds a lot of these suburban areas... and I don't mean the dogs are nutjobs, I mean the people who think it's cruel for a dog to live out with the livestock. But yeah, donkeys and llamas, perhaps... neighbor here has llamas, and they're exceedingly suspicious of everyone and everything other than their own sheep... they eye you like they've got a bullet with your name on it!
Incidentally barking like that is determined by a single dominant gene, so it's fairly easy to breed out. It was selected for because the barking tends to discourage some predators.
I can't imagine any breed of sheep doing well against cougars or coyotes. I have very non-nutjob LGD's but they have an annoying tendency to bark a lot at night and if the sheep were clearing suburban brush the neighbors would have a cow. Donkeys and llamas sometimes work. Electric fence and fladry are helpful too as well as keeping them contained.
Years ago, my dad got a mixed band of Mouflan and Barbados sheep from a pal of his from Texas.
Both are wild sheep breeds. The Barbados is an old domestic sheep from the island of the same name that is thought to be descended from a wild African sheep, and the Mouflan is an ancient wild sheep that originated in the Caucasus mountains. They are thought to be the ancestors of all domestic sheep. The bucks have large full horns that turn a complete circle, and the ewes have shorter but full horns.
Both are hair sheep, and both commonly have twins. The Mouflan lambs are always black when born, but develop a dark red coat with a lighter saddle and black stripes. A buck looks like an American bighorn sheep, but stouter, larger, and more muscular.
The ewes of both were always skittish, and the Barbados buck soon died (I don't know the cause), but the Mouflan buck became very tame around people. He would come up to almost anyone, bunt them gently, and then would really enjoy being scratched vigorously on the back. He also tolerated anyone pulling out the undercoat wool as it shed. He often followed me around all day while I was working out there, only occasionally checking up on his band of ewes. The 2 breeds got along with each other well, and we ended up with a lot of cross-bred lambs.
Dad turned them out with the horses in a large winter pasture we had out on the edge of the Arco desert. When we moved the horses up to the summer ranch in the Blackfoot mountains, the sheep stayed out on the desert. They fended for themselves very well year round out there.
We all did a lot of riding out there daily, as the pasture lay on one side of a long hill and ended on the other side of the summit. There were a couple of hollows in the hillside, and though it was all grass, all the animals would often disappear from view in a hollow or over the top.
There were a lot of coyotes out there. We would regularly find a dead one in the field and less often, in the yards. While I didn't ever see it, a hired man who lived there reported a mountain lion that hung around for most of one winter as well. Horses can kill coyotes, so we always thought they were the killers.
When the sheep got in the way in the yards, I would often round them up afoot and corral them in a pen Dad made for them. They were never hard to herd. I never used any of our dogs on them, as they were all cow dogs and didn't work sheep. Some never saw a domestic sheep.
One day when we had some cattle to load, I had my own dog with me, and left her in my truck when I corralled the sheep. She jumped out, curious, and peered through the space between 2 4-10 planks I used as a gate to shut them up. The buck saw the dog, immediately coiled like a spring, and launched. he hit one plank so hard it snapped in half. Until then, I had been fooled into thinking they were tamed and domesticated. The buck shook it off and was ready to go again, but my dog had split and jumped back in the truck where she was safe.
It turned out that the coyote killer was the Mouflan buck, not the horses. The hired man finally got the chance to see the buck in action one night. He said the buck attacked the coyote so fast the coyote couldn't jump away. The buck's blow broke all the ribs and the shoulder on one side, then 2 ewes also hit the coyote when it was down. They they all jumped on it repeatedly.
Eventually, for reasons known only to him, my old man rounded the sheep up one spring and took them up to the hills with the horses. They hung around the jingle pasture most of the summer, but by early fall disappeared into the timber above the pasture. I saw them up there once more, and that was it. The country up there must have been very close to their native range. A sheep man picked up a couple of the ewes when he was driving his bands down in the fall, but the rest of them just disappeared into the Blackfoots.
I like to think their descendants are still up there. For sure, God gave them all the protection they needed.
I still think that I could have lured them back if I had ever run across them. The buck would follow me anywhere if I had a grain bucket, and anyone could approach him. I think he eventually poached a few domestic ewes, made some athletic babies with them, and lived long.
I think the Barbados could be turned out in urbanity to keep the undergrowth eaten down, and most likely the Mouflan as well. Can't say if another Mouflan buck would be as easy around humans though- ours was the only one I've ever been up close with.
Have any of you seen this video of a golden eagle grabbing goats off of the mountain sides? Incredible footage...I never thought eagles did this. Not only do they pull the goats off of the mountainside but watch towards the end. A golden eagle picks up and carries away through the air a mountain goat! I couldn't believe my eyes!
Golden eagles have incredibly powerful legs, talons and necks. Get a load of this! The goat must be bleeding out as it's being carried away because once the eagle lets it down on the ground it's just plain done-for.
Last edited by elkotronics; 05-17-2014 at 04:14 PM..
Years ago, my dad got a mixed band of Mouflan and Barbados sheep from a pal of his from Texas.
I lived around a bunch of Barbados for 13 years, that pretty much took care of themselves around the ranch (this was in the hills just north of what's now Santa Clarita). We had tons of coyotes but I don't recall any lambs ever going missing. -- Left to their own devices, they're about as close to a wild animal as you can get and still be more or less domesticated. They crawl through fences just like a pronghorn. Skittish as they are ordinarily, if bottle-fed they're more clingy than a normal bottle-lamb!
Not too surprised about your ram vs unfortunate canids... I don't know Mouflans but Barbados are fast and athletic and once they make up their minds to something... klonk! and those well-armed rams... well!! Wouldn't surprise me at all if descendants of yours are still out there.
Main reason they wouldn't be my first choice is that they're harder to handle than most sheep, and tough on fences, and they get into things and climb almost as bad as goats. If the idea is to clean up around suburban property where you've already got people prone to complain, you kinda don't want almost-goats.
Quote:
Originally Posted by elkotronics
Have any of you seen this video of a golden eagle grabbing goats off of the mountain sides? Incredible footage...I never thought eagles did this. Not only do they pull the goats off of the mountainside but watch towards the end. A golden eagle picks up and carries away through the air a mountain goat! I couldn't believe my eyes!
Yeah, I'd seen that -- quite something!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by elkotronics
Golden eagles have incredibly powerful legs, talons and necks. Get a load of this! The goat must be bleeding out as it's being carried away because once the eagle lets it down on the ground it's just plain done-for.
Might have just gone shocky, as sheep and goats sometimes do.
If I was going to use animals to browse down overgrowth, I would use goats. Goats will eat weeds that are poisonous to other herbivores with no problems.
They would have to be herded, but I think any critters would need herding.
A nearby state or national forest wouldn't need to be completely grazed to damp down the fire danger at the edges of the forest, where the homes are. The underbrush, if grazed down, creates less low fuel for the fires, and would make digging a break or fire line much faster and easier.
The underbrush is what really gets a fire booming. A lot of the shrubs have greasy, explosive wood that catches much faster than trees and burns very hot once it goes up. Tall grasses go up even faster, and they serve to move the fire from one shrub to another. If the undergrowth is grazed down, there's very little ground fuel. A fire may move through, but not get hot enough to light up the trees.
If I was going to use animals to browse down overgrowth, I would use goats. Goats will eat weeds that are poisonous to other herbivores with no problems.
Goats are definitely better for grazing down weeds, and they can eat damnear anything (in Saudi Arabia, feral goats get by on nothing but the newspapers that blow out of the cities!), but the idea here was for suburban areas where you'd get a lot of complaints from homeowners if the graze patrol was destructive. And goats will climb into trees and strip them, while sheep just browse off the bottom three feet or so. A lot of the area that's an issue is heavily treed but after the first growing spasm in the spring, everything at ground level dries up and there's NOTHING green or with available moisture other than the trees. And that will particularly attract goats into climbing up into the crown after the moisture in the leaves and needles, where they'll denude the tree and eat every branch under an inch in diameter (and it only takes once of this happening to kill desert-dwelling trees). Pretty soon you'd have no brush, but you'd also have no trees. I've seen good-sized trees killed by goats.
Goats will also climb fences, and it takes a serious fence to keep out determined goats. They also scrape themselves along the fence until it's bowed or broken, then go under it. Once they get the notion they can go somewhere, the only option is to shoot the goat, because there is no changing its mind. And there's no fence that will keep 'em out of your garden once they realise it's a lot tastier than the dry brush. Sheep are much easier to keep out of where they're not wanted, and they don't climb.
People who haven't been in SoCal (and parts of the Bay area are the same) don't realise what both the terrain and the sprawl are like. California is the lumpiest place I've ever seen; there are mountains and an actual pass right in Los Angeles. And there's the huge snarl of subdivisions, but between every street in those hills there's also a narrow ridge that's pretty well treed (usually with junipers and/or scrub oak) and that also grows brush like nothing you ever see in the northern parts of the mountain west, cuz there's a huge dump of winter rain followed by a very long growing season (but usually no more rain). That combination with ridges, canyons, and tons of brush that's high in volatiles makes it a natural firetrap.
The city next door to ours uses goats to keep the weeds down in some of their more wild parks. They use a service that brings in a herd of goats for 2-3 weeks, puts up a temporary electric fence, and let's them eat until the weeds are gone. They use them in areas that are too steep to use other methods such as discing the weeds under.
Yeah, that's fine if it's a temporary thing. But what I was proposing was a permanent feral herd that wouldn't need any management, other than occasionally thinning the excess (the annual feral sheep BBQ!) and wouldn't need any fencing beyond what already exists... get rid of a chronic problem with no ongoing taxpayer expense.
[It continually amazes me that city folk pay to have goats brought in, when normally the livestock owner pays for grazing and for the goatboy. Goes to show how bassackwards this has all gotten.]
Yeah, that's fine if it's a temporary thing. But what I was proposing was a permanent feral herd that wouldn't need any management, other than occasionally thinning the excess (the annual feral sheep BBQ!) and wouldn't need any fencing beyond what already exists... get rid of a chronic problem with no ongoing taxpayer expense.
[It continually amazes me that city folk pay to have goats brought in, when normally the livestock owner pays for grazing and for the goatboy. Goes to show how bassackwards this has all gotten.]
When they came into people's yards and ate the landscaping, all hell would break loose.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
