Livestock guard animals - Donkey or Mule?

[Ramseys]

1 hour ago, DingoJay said:




  I suspect llamas and their kin are rather expensive, though.

Just let the guy down the road buy some, in 6 months you can take 'em off his hands pretty cheap.




Unless they are bottle raised, and handled every day, they are loud, spitty beasts.




That need to be trimmed every year like sheep.




So unless you like being covered in llama spit and hair, not a fun job.

[ferritlove]

Yah DingoJay and Ramseys, I had considered llamas - and I'm not scared of a little llama rumen juice and hair.  I get used to that smell when the sheep and goats come and hang out by us when we're sitting outside and just have to chew cud right in my face. 




One upside of llamas is the guy that shears our sheep will do llama/alpaca too.  the downside is I just don't like llamas that much, but maybe they don't like me either so that's fair.




 

[heavyhorse]

I have used donkeys, and a pony-size mini-mule (donkey X mini mare).  Been to farms that used llamas or LGD’s, or different combinations.




I don’t get along with llamas and they don’t get along with me.  (The males fight by castrating their opponent, thus removing them from the gene pool.  Bear that in mind. . . . )




The regional sheep/goat sale barn has banned the sale of LGD’s (dogs) with herds or separately, after settling insurance claims from selling animals from different owners, and having the dogs kill the animals not from “their” herd.  (The dogs consider their herd as their “pack” and may kill “outsiders” as a pack would kill a wolf from another pack.)  They still sell llamas and donkeys at the sheep/goat sales.




Mules don’t have a complete set of instincts, refined over generations.  Each mule is a one-off, with a combination of instincts from different species, that will never be refined by success or failure.  My female mini-mule steals the babies from other species, resulting in deaths.  She killed a foal by kicking at it’s mother and crushing the foal’s head instead.  So now she lives in a field away from female animals or babies.  I might add that she is fully sexual; mules are sterile but definitely not frigid.  She has the odd habit of teasing me, moving a few steps away and stopping and looking back, repeatedly, until we are a distance from the other animals, then having full-on estrus sex.  




My donkeys have been very effective against dogs.  I have watched them chase a dog out of a field, then gallop around to the open gate and resume the chase through the next field.  That dog never returned.




They have not been effective against the recent crop of coyotes.  The Game and Fish Dept says that pretty much all of the coyotes now have greater or lesser amounts of wolf DNA, from the Canadian Greys.  They are bigger, and more clever, but still solitary.  They hide where the donkeys can’t go, and drag adult sheep back where the donkeys can’t reach them.  On occasion they have dragged an adult ram through a 5-wire electric fence 15 feet onto the neighbor’s field, where the donkey couldn’t follow.




The Game and Fish Dept “Animal Damage Biologist” came out and set up a trapline around the perimeter of the property, which I ran daily, and I haven’t had any predator losses in 3 years since.  (I called all the neighbors and a couple of area people who run dogs as a “courtesy” and told them I had traps out, and their dogs might get scuffed if they let them run at large.  This also seemed to be effective, and I didn’t get a single unfriendly response; some of them thanked me since they had coyote losses as well.)  I have reduced the trapline to just 8 traps now, and get about one per month.




I very strongly recommend only female protection animals; as other people have mentioned the males are aggressive, both sexually and attacking other animals.  And even then, buy a jenny that has been raised around the species you have.  And only one, or they will pair off together and not stay with your herd.