Guard Dogs Keep Big Cats Away from Livestock

According to new research from the University of Kent, livestock owners in South Africa can significantly reduce conflict between their animals and large carnivores such as cheetahs and leopards by employing guard dogs.

The find is good news for livestock owners and conservationists alike, as the former's herd may be spared from becoming a big cat's next meal and the latter will herald the reduction of unwarranted killing of endangered species.

The researchers said that the presence of guard dogs eliminated the loss of livestock to predatory carnivores by 91 percent, which they said amounted to an annual savings of $3,000 to the farmers whose livestock would have died otherwise.

The guard dogs offered ranchers piece of mind, the researchers learned, after ranchers reported increased tolerance of predatory animals roaming their land as long as a dog was present. Ranchers without guard dogs did not seem to be as tolerant of cheetah and other predators roaming their land, while ranchers with guarding dogs reported a greater overall presence of predatory animals on their land.

"This research has shown for the first time that livestock guarding dogs can successfully be used in South Africa to protect livestock from attack by predators as large as leopards or small as jackals," said conservation ecologist Nikki Rust. "This is a true win-win solution to reduce conflict between livestock and predators, because it almost eliminates livestock losses to predators, saving the farmer a lot of money, whilst increasing the tolerance of predators from the farmers, thereby reducing the chance of using lethal control on threatened carnivores."

Douglas Macmillan, of Cambridge's Durrell Institute of Conservation Ecology, said: "Retaliatory killing by farmers is a major threat to the survival of many large carnivore species. This study shows that livestock deaths can be avoided through the deployment of highly trained dogs, and I am sure that there are many similar situations around the world where such dogs could make quite a difference to the survival chances of large carnivores."

Rust, Macmillan and their colleagues' research is published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin.