When Coyotes Threatened Livestock on Central Texas Ranches, the Solution Was to Unlock an Ancient Ability in Dogs

Robin Giles did not quite believe the rumors that passed among his neighbors. He couldn’t yet picture the carnage: pastures bloodied by the carcasses of sheep and goats with highly distinctive wounds—bite marks at the throat, abdominal cavities emptied of lungs and liver, entrails left to rot in the Hill Country sun. Coyotes. 

It was the late 1960s, and Giles was in his 20s, a big man with dark, curly hair and cool blue eyes. His family had been raising livestock on their ranch in Kendall County, about 50 miles north of San Antonio, for nearly a century. In bygone times, Texas ranchers had waged a war of extirpation against coyotes, and Giles believed the war had been won. A coyote had scarcely been seen in that landscape for more than 40 years. 

The Hill Country makes up part of a vast region known as the Edwards Plateau. As a matter of both geography and legend, there is no place closer to the heart of Texas. Occupying tens of thousands of square miles—an area more than twice the size of Massachusetts—­the plateau encompasses the intersection of Central, South and West Texas. It is bordered by Austin and San Antonio to the east, and to the west by the Pecos River and the Chihuahuan Desert. Its history is exceptionally violent. By the 1700s, the Tonkawa people were driven out by the Apache, who were in turn nearly exterminated by the Comanche. For much of the 19th century, the plateau was a site of the Texas-Indian wars, which resulted in the destruction and displacement of numerous Indigenous nations and became fodder for countless Westerns, including John Ford’s The Searchers. Until the Civil War, white settlers primarily raised cattle; as overgrazing depleted the once-rich grasslands, they brought in increasingly large herds of sheep and goats, whose diets were well suited to manage brush.

Alfred Giles, Robin’s grandfather, was an architect from England who arrived in Texas in 1873, seeking a more agreeable climate to help him deal with the long-term effects of rheumatic fever. He established a practice in San Antonio and made his name designing stately courthouses and homes, many of which now appear on the National Register of Historic Places. A ranching boom was on, stoked by high prices for sheep’s wool and for the mohair produced by Angora goats. In 1885, Alfred and his brother-in-law began buying land. They amassed more than 13,000 acres, and the property became known as Hillingdon Ranch, after the rural English parish where Alfred was born. It was soon home to thousands of sheep and goats and a smaller number of black Aberdeen Angus cattle.

Texas wool and mohair production, concentrated on the Edwards Plateau, reached their respective peaks in the mid-20th century, but growing foreign competition and punishing droughts made the business more challenging. Many ranchers got out of shearing and clipping altogether in favor of lamb and mutton, and overall production declined. Still, Texas remains the largest source of sheep and goats in the country, and for decades Edwards Plateau ranchers did not count predation among their most pressing concerns. For Robin Giles, things changed in 1970.

That year, more than 400 of his sheep and goats were killed by coyotes. “Before that, I kind of thought everybody was exaggerating,” Giles said recently. “And then, boy, when they hit me: Whoo! I realized we had to do something.” He enlisted a U.S. Fish and Wildlife trapper and together they killed 14 coyotes. But the damage was done. The losses that year came to roughly $10,000—more than $82,000 in today’s dollars—or 70 percent of Hillingdon Ranch’s potential income. 

Giles became expert in anti-coyote measures: steel traps, helicopter hunts, a bait-activated sodium cyanide gun called the M-44. He improved his fencing, installing snares below and barbed wire on top to deter climbing. In response, the animals dug holes and shimmied beneath the fencing on their sides, creating characteristic hollows known as coyote slides. “Coyotes are so smart,” Giles said. “The more you deal with ’em, the more you realize how they’re going to be here when we’re all gone.” Giles got a reputation for the intensity of his campaign against predators. He shared his acquired wisdom with his son Grant, and for several decades, it was enough to keep them afloat. 

But in the meantime, a massive transfer of land was under­way as historical ranches were subdivided and sold off by a new generation who preferred 9-to-5 “town jobs” to agriculture. Some properties were developed as exurbs of the state’s expanding cities. More frequently, they became commercial hunting preserves or luxe getaways for wealthy residents of Austin, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. As the ranchers who once kept coyotes in check by killing as many of them as they could sold out and moved on, the predator population exploded. Grant Giles, 40, and his wife, Misty, 44, are now the primary stewards of Hillingdon Ranch. “Not that long ago, there were many, many landowners doing what we do,” Grant told me. “When there was a predator issue, they would all work together and try to nip it in the bud.”

As the region reconstitutes itself along modern lines, the plateau is becoming, ironically, more wild. Strange and macabre scenes are common. Sharp-beaked crested caracara birds devour the eyes of newborn calves. Black vultures carry away kid goats. Feral hogs gobble up lambs, leaving behind nothing but hooves. There are bobcats and mountain lions. Coyotes, easily the most significant threat, seem to be getting wilier. Grant told me, “I’ve seen coyotes defecate on top of an M-44 as a message: I see what you’re trying to do, and I’m not buying it.” 

By 2016, it was clear to Grant that the status quo wouldn’t hold. He was losing as many as 20 percent of his lambs and kid goats to predators, and he knew things could get worse: On the Edwards Plateau, 50 percent and even 90 percent losses were not unheard of. Coyotes were driving some stockmen out of business, others to the brink of collapse, and generally threatening a way of life that is integral to Texan identity. “It’s like having an ever-increasing-
size hole in your canoe, and you’re trying to bail out water,” Grant said. In desperation, he decided to go see a fellow rancher about a decade younger than his father who was reputed to have cultivated an ancient knowledge, largely neglected in the United States, that had allowed him to prosper while his neighbors flailed. His name was Bob Buchholz. He was a man who knew about dogs. 

Other than hunting, protecting livestock may have been the first work assigned to domestic dogs. They probably got the job more than 5,000 years ago. The ancestors of modern livestock protection breeds, of which the white and downy Great Pyrenees is perhaps the best-known in America, are thought to have arrived in Europe in the sixth century B.C., accompanying shepherds from the Caucasus. Roman Farm Management: The Treatises of Cato and Varro, which compiles agricultural knowledge from the first and second centuries B.C., describes dogs as “of the greatest importance to us who feed the woolly flock, for the dog is the guardian of such [livestock] as lack the means to defend themselves, chiefly sheep and goats. For the wolf is wont to lie in wait for them, and we oppose our dogs to him as defenders.”

Geographical isolation and selective breeding, mostly by shepherds in mountainous regions of Europe and Asia, have since yielded roughly 40 distinct livestock guardian breeds. (How distinct is a source of contention among breeders and kennel clubs.) These types include the Italian Maremma, the Balkan Sarplaninac, the Afghan Kuchi and the Caucasian ovcharka. Bred for cold-weather hardiness, many are on the fluffy side, but they vary considerably in appearance. Within and among breeds, their coats may be long or short; black, brown, fawn, white or gray; pure in color or brindled or spotted. The breeds are uniformly large. Ideal specimens generally stand about 30 inches tall at the withers and weigh between 80 and 150 pounds. 

Certain breeds seem to perform better against wolves, others against coyotes. Some dogs prefer to cruise the perimeter of their pastures, while others stay close to the herd. But there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules. In Europe and Asia, livestock guardian dogs have been used to fend off, in addition to wolves, the brown bear and the coyote-like golden jackal. In recent years, they’ve been fielded to protect African goats, sheep and cattle from cheetahs and leopards; and in Australia, to defend the world’s smallest penguins against red foxes. 

But, with the exception of the Navajo, who likely learned from Spanish missionaries to use dogs to guard sheep, ranchers in the U.S. were slow to adopt livestock guardian dogs. When Buchholz was growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, in a tiny ranching town that has since been subsumed by greater Austin, they were largely unknown on the Edwards Plateau. Had they been prevalent, Buchholz would have noticed. “Ever since I was a little bitty kid, that’s all I ever dreamed of—ranching,” he told me. “The people I grew up knowing were my heroes. They were pure stockmen. Their livelihood depended on the quality of their lamb and kid crop, their pride in that product, their ability to manage the land.” After college, Buchholz worked as a day laborer on ranches and as a breaker of horses. He and his older brother, David, saved some money, leased a modest acreage, and bought a few hundred goats. They soon found, however, that their dream looked doomed: They were losing too many animals to coyotes. 

Still, Buchholz was determined to make a go of it. In the late ’70s, he heard of a dog trader out of Lampasas, and he and David bought five Great Pyrenees, a breed that has long protected flocks in the Pyrenees Mountains. To educate himself on their use, Buchholz visited several libraries. But he could find virtually no practical information. “You found out the Pyrenees dog and the Anatolian shepherd dog and the Turkish akbash dog were so many inches at the shoulder, and they weighed so much at maturity, and they were used by shepherds in the mountains,” Buch­holz recalled. “And that’s all! There was no printed material that would enable me to figure out how they worked or why they worked and such as that.”

For a year or so, the Buchholz brothers, both single at the time, rarely left their pastures, observing the Pyrenees and how their herds interacted with them. At night, they lay in sleeping bags, listening to their dogs bark and to the howl of coyotes. They began to discover for themselves what shepherds in Asia and Europe had passed down for thousands of years. They saw how the dogs established dominance over a pasture through confrontation, scent marking and barking, enforcing a buffer zone between livestock and coyotes. The dogs were not territorial as such. Their domain, and their protective instincts, shifted with the flock, and their dialogue with predators only rarely resulted in violence.

Of the first dogs the Buchholzes acquired, only two, a male and a female, proved to be effective livestock guardians. But that was enough to significantly increase the survival rate of their goats. By breeding the pair, they produced about 40 similarly skilled Pyrenees. The dogs gave the brothers a competitive edge, allowing them to lease property at a discount in South Texas, where coyotes were especially numerous. “Nobody else could use that country because of the sheer amount of predation,” Buchholz said. “We expanded our operation because of the dogs—kept acquiring properties no one else could operate.”

He and David returned to the Edwards Plateau and amicably went separate ways in business. With his wife, Mary, and three adult sons, Buchholz now runs several thousand sheep and goats on more than a half-dozen properties spread across the region. Two are family-owned and the others leased. With roughly one dog for every 100 to 125 head of livestock, the ranches are patrolled by dozens of guardian dogs, many of whom share common ancestors.

Since the 1980s, Buchholz has also been breeding dogs for sale. The Great Pyrenees is still his favorite breed, but its heavy coat is liable to attract the burs and thorns that grow abundantly on local vegetation and is otherwise ill-suited to Texas weather. After some trial and error, Buchholz developed a more streamlined mix: predominantly Turkish akbash, with hints of Pyrenees and Anatolian shepherd. But genetics offer no guarantee; even among dogs with venerable bloodlines, almost none will ever make effective livestock guardians without a proper upbringing. More important than parentage are the first few months of puppyhood, when the dogs’ brains grow rapidly and become imprinted with the social bonds that either will or won’t attach them to livestock. “It’s imperative that those pups are with their companion animals between 6 and 12 weeks of age,” Buchholz said. “It affects them for the rest of their life.”

Buchholz and his brother devised a system that Buchholz says he hasn’t much tinkered with: “Sometimes you roll the dice and you get the right number.” They built simple “bonding pens”: enclosed areas measuring roughly 40 feet by 40 feet and isolated from people and other animals. “That female that’s fixin’ to whelp, she whelps with a [sheep or a goat] in the pen. Those little bitty puppies, once they open their eyes and start crawling around, they will interact with that companion animal. Normally that companion animal has already raised numerous litters. That’s what their job is, to stay in the whelping pen.”

When the puppies are 6 to 8 weeks old, their mother is removed. “The puppies are looking for mama, and that enhances their bonding to the companion animal,” Buchholz explained. Too much interaction with people risks diluting the dogs’ bond with livestock and increasing their inclination to roam. Too little and they may become difficult to manage when, for example, their owner needs to vaccinate them, remove porcupine quills from their snout or load them onto a trailer to move them from one ranch to another. For several weeks, Buchholz’s dogs are fed by hand, providing them with limited, friendly human contact. With few exceptions—sickness, injury, extreme cold—livestock guardian dogs live outdoors, and, while still in the pens, the puppies learn to eat from the automatic pasture feeders they will rely on while dwelling with their flocks. 

Guardian dogs often have litters of eight or more, and at about ten weeks, Buchholz places the pups in groups of two or three in separate pens. To ensure that they bond with species, not individual animals, sheep and goats rotate through. “You’re always looking for that instinct to interact with livestock,” Buchholz said. “You’re looking for a pup that’s trying to lick ’em on the nose, trying to be close to ’em, trying to rear up on ’em and such as that.” Puppies being puppies, some roguishness is to be expected, and Buchholz favors mature, sturdy companion animals that won’t hesitate to dispense disciplinary headbutts.

The dogs are neutered—an unfixed dog has more incentive to roam—and they complete their education in the pasture, where, ideally, they join experienced guardians whose example they will follow. If a dog isn’t going to work out, it’s usually apparent by the time it reaches adolescence, between around 6 and 14 months. Common teenage mischief includes chasing, chewing and even killing livestock—often inadvertently. Buchholz might place a problem dog in a pen with a humorless billy goat, nanny or ram for a remedial lesson in manners. But inevitably, some dogs are culled. 

Buchholz knows this can offend modern sensibilities. But he makes no apologies. He guarantees his dogs and knows that their quality can make or break a customer’s business. “Those shepherds in the Pyrenees Mountains, or on the plains of Turkey, what would they have put up with?” he asked rhetorically. “What would keep them profitable? What would keep their families and their flocks alive?” 

When Buchholz got his first Pyrenees, back in the 1970s, he was one of perhaps a few dozen ranchers in America using guardian dogs. By 2019, nearly 30 percent of sheep ranchers had gotten on board, and today Buchholz is one of the most prolific breeders in Texas. 

The largest property the Buchholzes currently operate is called Angell Ranch. It spans nearly 20,000 acres—a lease near the heart of the Edwards Plateau about 50 miles east of the family headquarters in Eldorado. The area remains extremely rural, with rolling hills and vast, flat valleys punctuated by tiny ranching settlements and ghost towns. Eldorado is the only municipality in Schleicher County. At 1,311 square miles, Schleicher is about the size of Rhode Island. At last count, 2,451 people lived there.

Angell Ranch is overseen by Buchholz’s eldest son, Robert, who lives on the property and runs more than 2,000 goats. Robert, 33, is a voluble, easygoing, rosy-cheeked man with a neat mustache and his father’s clear blue eyes. On a bright January morning, Buch­holz, Robert and I had coffee in the kitchen of the little one-story house in which Robert and his wife, Meredith, were then living. (They have since added a baby girl, Caroline, and moved to a newer house nearby.) Robert was dressed in a dark wool vest over a mustard-colored wool sweater, Buchholz in a dark blue denim jacket over a faded blue denim shirt. Both wore jeans, wire-rimmed glasses and scuffed boots. Two cast-iron skillets rested on a well-used stove, and the room was fragrant with bacon.

Robert’s brothers flirted with real estate and banking, respectively, before returning to the family business. But Robert never seriously considered another profession, notwithstanding the goatherd’s place in the ranching hierarchy. “The cowman generally looks down on the sheepman,” he said, laughing. “And the sheepman looks down on the goatman, and the goatman don’t really have anybody to look down on, ’cause we’re at the bottom.” The ranch had a very good year in 2025, with a kid crop of 154 percent, or an average of 1.5 baby goats for every breeding nanny. “If we have any success in our operation, it’s due to the dogs,” Robert said.

He and Buchholz donned tan cowboy hats, and we went outside and squeezed into the cab of Robert’s flatbed truck. Two cheerful border collies lay atop bags of dog food and livestock mineral supplement in the back. Robert drove over bumpy dirt roads toward a north-lying pasture. The country was sere: papery blond grasses; clusters of cacti; bare, witchy mesquite. White-tailed deer fled before us through the brush, leaping fences; a roadrunner sped by. Robert slowed and opened his door, pointing to a coyote slide beneath a fence.

As we drove, we discussed a unique project at Texas A&M University. Founded in 2017, it’s the only university-affiliated program in the country devoted to the study and training of livestock guardian dogs. Bill Costanzo, a former high school ag teacher, has been at the helm since 2019, seeking to perfect, standardize and disseminate the sort of information Buchholz obtained the hard way. Costanzo oversees a bonding program that places dogs with ranchers, as well as a blog and a YouTube channel. He visits stockmen, documenting their difficulties, making recommendations and incorporating what he learns into shareable best practices: feeding stations resistant to varmints; cost-effective GPS trackers; fencing strategies to decrease roaming and strengthen dogs’ bonds with livestock.

Costanzo differs with Buchholz on some points—he shows more faith in correcting adolescent misbehavior—but they’re largely in accord. His work builds on a scattershot body of research that dates in the U.S. to roughly the time Buchholz got his first Pyrenees, when Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, married biologists at Hampshire College, imported two dozen livestock guardian dogs from Italy, Turkey and Yugoslavia. They bred them, placed several hundred of the offspring with ranchers and published more than a half-dozen studies on the topic. Along with research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in the 1980s, their work sparked a surge of interest in guardian dogs. But this nascent popularity engendered questionable folk wisdom. It became widely held that to be effective, guardian dogs had to be unneutered and have virtually no contact with people. Virile, half-wild dogs aren’t known for selective breeding habits, and few ranchers understood bonding protocols. The result was a glut of livestock guardian dogs with little interest in guarding livestock. In some ranching communities, they came to be regarded as agents of chaos. “It got to where you couldn’t give a dog away,” Buchholz said.

Aided by a trickle of blogs by guardian dog advocates, most of them ranchers, and a growing body of academic studies, the reputation of guardian dogs gradually recovered. But there was still a lot of misinformation floating around, and no central source of reliable, practical advice. 

When I stopped by his office, Costanzo told me that after he took the job at Texas A&M, he started cold-calling ranchers he’d heard were struggling with predators. “I would call ’em up and say, ‘I’m the livestock guardian specialist at the center; do you need some help?’” he recalled. “Nobody ever said, ‘No.’” Over time, Costanzo developed a rancher survey that he uses to create customized plans of action. “I write up a list of recommendations and send it back to them: This is what I think you should do, and here’s the timeline.” He now gets inquiries from about ten ranchers a week. Some come from places like Wyoming and Montana, where wolves and grizzlies can require the use of larger, more aggressive guardian breeds. But many are local. “It seems like most of Texas has my cell number,” Costanzo said.

Back at the Buchholz ranch, we reached a pasture occupied by 300 goats. Two of the four dogs assigned to the group loped toward us. One dog, named Sherbet, with a longish coat and rust-colored ear patches, appeared inquisitive but friendly, wagging its tail. The other, Captain Ahab, was one of Buchholz’s best guardians—a trim, powerful, off-white dog with a broad, protrusive skull. He barked deeply and continuously, bounding back and forth. “I like a dog that barks a lot,” Buchholz later told me. The goats wore bells. When rung excitedly, these would alert the dogs to trouble. Now they chimed pleasantly in the breeze. The goats bleated and blew, waiting for Robert to turn on the livestock feeder attached to his truck. Goats, famously, will eat almost anything, including the invasive juniper and mesquite that leach water from local soils. But winter calls for supplemental feed. 

All of the goats on the ranch were pregnant—part of a cycle designed to ensure that virtually every birth happens within a 45-day window. “You are going to overwhelm predators with the numbers of kids on the ground,” Robert said. “They can’t kill ’em all.” By contrast, a more diffuse breeding season creates a conveyor belt effect, delivering regular, bite-size portions. “They’ll ‘one’ you to death,” Buchholz explained. But it was still a vulnerable period: The livestock, typically separated into two large herds that graze relatively circumscribed pastures, were now divided into small groups across multiple pastures to give birth, making it nearly impossible for the dogs to cover every flank.

The next morning, we drove to another leased property, outside Eldorado. (Buchholz declined to show me his bonding pens, at the home ranch, citing concerns about canine parvovirus, a contagious, potentially lethal infection that commonly travels on the soles of shoes and has previously wiped out his litters.) We got out of the truck beside a trough where a flock of ewes had gathered with their lambs, attended by several dogs.

I shivered in the wind, and Buchholz fingered my fleece—a skeptical merchant appraising an inferior product. “You’re wearing polyester,” he said. “It’s a lot cheaper to the American public.” His son, he noted approvingly, wore wool. “That’s pretty unusual. Most your age wear polyester. At the same time they’re saying: The environment’s being ruined by all these microfibers! Well, welcome to reality, Bubba.” The Buchholzes left the wool and mohair business years ago, despairing of vanishing profits and labor. An operation of their size might once have employed 25 people; like the other ranchers I spoke to, they now rely almost entirely on family.

Instead, their livestock are raised for meat, though more than 70 percent of the lamb consumed in the U.S. is now imported—think of the high-end cuts whose origins in Australia and New Zealand are advertised on menus and in Whole Foods display cases. Texas lamb and mutton often end up on the coasts, where they are sold in markets that cater to immigrants. That demand has kept the Buchholzes in business. 

“We’re trying to learn more about our consumer, how to make a better product for them,” Robert said. He worries that like the descendants of Texas ranchers, second- and third-generation immigrants will abandon tradition—that they, too, will order Grubhub, rather than a whole goat from the halal butcher.

When Grant and Misty Giles, of Hillingdon Ranch, reached Buchholz in 2017, he had a yearslong wait list for puppies. Grant couldn’t afford the delay and bought a number of guardian dogs from breeders and other ranchers. The results were not what he hoped for. Feral and distrustful of people, the Gileses’ first dogs refused to accept food from them. The dogs also frequently went AWOL. Grant and Misty found themselves spending a lot of time replacing the batteries for their collar GPS trackers. One day, their four dogs crossed onto an adjacent property and attacked the owner’s chickens. The neighbor shot two of them. 

The Gileses finally got their first Buchholz dogs in 2021. Today they have 14, plus one dog they adopted from a rancher who was going out of business. “They all have the behaviors we’re looking for,” Robin Giles, now 83, said on a recent morning. Their livestock had adjusted to the dogs’ presence, and having drastically reduced predation, Giles said, “We are in charge of our own destiny.”

Later, Grant, Misty and I toured the property on a rugged four-wheeler. Grant, in forest camo, pushed the vehicle full-throttle up and down steep grades, over saplings and dense brush. Stones and dust flew in through a hole in the floor. Grant described passing scenery with encyclopedic intimacy: a hidden spring, variations in soil, a catalog of plants and their uses. “Post oak, blackjack, escarpment cherry,” he said, indicating. “Ashe juniper, live oak, Texas persimmon, King Ranch bluestem, little bluestem, yellow Indiangrass, eastern gamagrass, Spanish oak, wild grape.” He explained, “If you don’t know what’s supporting your livestock, how the land responds to grazing pressure, you’re behind. I’m never bored driving through a pasture. Every plant is telling you a story.”

We stopped at dog feeding stations, where Misty checked the attached cameras and replenished feed. The Gileses go through 150 pounds of dog food a week—a major expense. The stations were made from metal cages that once housed oil-industry fuel bladders. Effective at repelling deer and hogs, they’re accessible to smaller critters. Traps were set beside them. One contained a mournful raccoon. In addition to dog food, Grant said, raccoons will eat the lips and noses off live baby goats. He withdrew a pistol, inserted its muzzle into the trap and fired. 

Texas stockmen, often openly hostile toward “animal rightists,” sometimes make unlikely and persuasive advocates for nonlethal predator control—guardian dogs as a first line of defense, rather than poison traps and helicopter hunts. But like most of the ranchers I talked to, Grant emphasized that even with guardian dogs, lethal methods are sometimes necessary. Certain especially shrewd coyotes can circumvent even seasoned livestock guardians, and large boar hogs often aren’t intimidated by the dogs, which will fight to the death defending their flocks. Such situations argue for mounting up heavily armed or temporarily paddocking the herds and setting traps.

At the same time, once guardian dogs establish an equilibrium, ranchers are well advised not to upset it. Killing a coyote that’s not preying on livestock will create a vacuum, which might be filled by one that’s unfamiliar with the local order—and thus inclined to look on livestock as food. Adapting to this reality can be challenging. “Ten or 15 years ago, when Bob Buchholz would say something like that—If you have a coyote, don’t kill it—that sounded like crazy talk,” Grant said. “It doesn’t really sink in when you haven’t got guard dogs on your place.” 

Hillingdon Ranch today has about 30 owners, all of them related to its founders. Homesteads, including the one where Grant and Misty live with their two young sons, are scattered across the property. But many of Hillingdon’s more than 300 potential heirs live in other states, and the Gileses are the only professional ranchers in the group, managing most of the original 13,000 acres through a combination of partnerships, leases and diplomacy. Within the family, selling out is severely frowned upon. “Once that happens, it’s never going to be converted back into rangeland,” Grant said. “We want to give ourselves the best chance of survival.” 

Robin Giles’ house, which belonged to his father, Palmer, before him, serves as a headquarters and a gathering place for events: holidays, baptisms, weddings, funerals. Several members of the extended family have asked to be buried on the ranch; others already are. At a cliffside lookout, we watched golden eagles cruise below us over a deep, rocky canyon, where ram lambs were pastured among lounging cattle. It was a high, flat, beautiful place. Palmer had asked to be interred there, but the ground proved too hard, and the family went to Plan B, careful to follow Palmer’s instructions that his grave be unfenced, so that livestock could always tread over it. 

On the way back to headquarters, two guardian dogs, George and Reba, bounded onto our path. Both were tall and slim, cream-colored, with slightly matted fur and large dark eyes. Their sheep were nearby, audible but out of sight. The dogs were benign but aloof; once they were satisfied we weren’t a threat, their interests clearly lay elsewhere. 

It’s an oddity of livestock guardian dogs that their owners almost never observe them interact with a predator. Their art is practiced mostly unseen, in the low light of dusk and dawn, when their enemies are most active. The proof of their value is the simple absence of death. Misty, whom all the dogs like best, disembarked and poured some kibble. After a few cautious bites, George fled, running across the trail and into the trees. His sheep, Misty said, were getting too far away for his liking. Reba lingered a little while longer over her food. Then she, too, was gone.