Capital Punishment in Farm Country

You can’t undo some things.

A Hungarian Komondor guard dog takes down a coyote to protect his flock.

To be a sheep farmer is to live under siege, all the time.  It’s not just the banker breathing down your neck.  Sheep are prey, through and through, born lunch for anything with teeth and carnivorous instincts.  The worst days on a farm are when you discover one of your flock has been mauled or killed. Losing lambs is bad enough.  But if it’s a ewe, it’s not just the one animal. It’s a lifetime of breeding and nurturing to get the maternal bloodlines to where you have a ewe raising at least two lambs every year.  A farm that weans fewer than two lambs per ewe per year is a farm going out of business.  A farm losing those ewes to dog or coyote or wolf attacks is also a farm going out of business.

We learned to fight fire with fire as our flock size increased.  As our beloved Weimaraners aged and passed away, livestock working dogs replaced them.  Not just herding dogs, but large guard dogs to protect the sheep. The best were Hungarian Komondorok.  These large, white guard dogs outweigh both sheep and most predators.  We had one that tipped the scale at 160 pounds.  They bond with the sheep and live with them.  Their long, corded coats are protection from predators’ teeth and camouflage.  You have to look twice to pick them out in your flock. You’d pay a thousand dollars for a Komondor pup in the 1980s, when you could find them.  Then you have to train them.  Sadly, they don’t live very long.

Our latest Komondor had just died of cancer at five years of age.  The loss of yet another canine partner and worrying about the sheep being unprotected aggravated Dad’s insomnia.  He would call me in the wee hours of the morning when he was unable to get to sleep.  Fortunately, I was working in a western time zone, so these calls were late night for me, and so not too disruptive.  While our relationship was rocky and he could be defensive in person, there was something about the phone that made him feel safer talking to me about his worries and daily challenges.  After handing his worries off to me, he could finally get to sleep with the illusion that someone else is now carrying the water to the fire.  These phone calls greatly relieved Mom, because Dad’s alternative was to wake her up and dump whatever was worrying him on her.  Then he could go to sleep — and leave her lying awake worrying!  So, for Mom’s sake, I would pick up those late-night calls and listen to the latest farm crisis.

“No one has any Komondor pups,” Dad complained.  “I’ve called every breeder we know and no dice!  But that Great Pyrenees breeder on Route 230 just called to say she heard we were looking for another sheep guard dog.  She has a nearly full-grown dog and wants us to consider him. He’s not Komondor. He’s Great Pyrenees.  He won’t be as big as a Komondor but he’ll probably live longer.  But I’ve heard a lot of different opinions on those and I just don’t know.”

“How much does she want for this dog?” I asked warily, remembering that this particular breeder got very good prices for her Great Pyrenees pups.  Not as much as the Komondor breeders were getting, but still a hefty bite out of the bank account.

“Well, that’s the thing.  Something bad happened to this dog when he was little—she doesn’t know what—in his first home,” he answered. “She’s a reputable breeder, just like we were. You always take a pup back if things are not working out,” Dad recalled from our own time breeding Weimaraners in the 1960s and 70s.  “She says she already tried two other homes. The dog didn’t bond with anyone and ran away from both. She thinks he needs experienced handlers and a completely different environment.  Like a farm.  She’ll just give him to us.”

Great Pyrenees are known for being a one-person-plus-livestock breed, so the genetic deck was stacked against this dog.  “She said ‘If anyone can restore this dog’s faith in humanity, you all can.’  Well, for us, the dog just has to bond with the sheep and protect them, so she thinks that giving him a job he’s bred for will be the magic cure for whatever ails him.” Working guard dogs live in the barn and pastures with their charges, not in the house.  Bonding with people is optional, although it helps if the guard dog doesn’t decide that the sheep need protection from the shepherd. “Well, can’t hurt to go look at the dog, I guess.”

The dog was a little over a year old.  He was a magnificent representative of his breed and had the pedigree to show where those looks came from. But whatever had happened to him as a pup—what, the breeder did not know—had destroyed his trust in any human being.  The first owner had returned the young dog to the breeder with no explanation for why he cowered and avoided people.

Dad took an instant liking to the dog despite his aloofness.  Mom and Dad decided to give him another chance.  Dad volunteered to make the dog—soon named Bear—his project.  This was a departure from his history of assigning “any problem that had legs” to Mom or me while he focused on “the problems with roots.”  But a few years before this, Dad had taken our advice that he needed to quit his corn operation.  The sheep won him over.  He had become a full-time shepherd and grass-farmer.  And he’d always loved dogs.  His love of dogs had even overcome being attacked and badly injured by one during his military service in Germany.

But Bear was not willing to give any human being another chance.  “He just hangs on the other end of the leash, as far away from me as he can get, no matter what I do,” Dad complained to me after several weeks. “He’s so busy keeping his distance from me, he’s not even looking at the sheep!”

One day, Bear got away from Dad during a walk to the barn. “Somehow he slipped out of his collar, and I was left holding the leash and empty collar, feeling like an idiot!” Dad reported.

Bear took up residence in a thicket of trees between the farmhouse and a nearby creek.  He would watch warily as Dad set out food for him near the barn.  Dad’s plan was to gradually shift the bowl closer to the barn where Bear would presumably take up residence after deciding the sheep were his family.   Dad would sit a little distance away from the food and speak to Bear quietly, in hopes that would accustom the dog to his presence and build trust.  He planned to move his chair slightly closer to the food each day, as soon as Bear began to eat in his presence.

Dad updated me regularly on his progress with Bear—or rather, his lack of progress.  “I can’t sit there ALL day,” he said in frustration.  “That dog just stares at me across the food bowl, not moving an inch until I have to go take care of the flock.  Lambs are dropping now.”  Dad would go in the barn or run to the co-op and return to find the bowl empty.  Over the weeks, he never saw the dog actually eat.  Dad was worried about him.  “I don’t know if he’s eating the food, or that damn ‘coon is,” Dad complained.  Racoons love dog and cat food.  I understood his concern.  During my visits home, I could see that the dog’s appearance was declining.  His coat became matted with burrs and he looked thinner.  But he didn’t run away and Dad kept trying.

“Bear watched me from a spot closer to the bowl today,” a typical night-time call might start.  “So maybe he’s coming around a little.”

“Bear is back to his old distance,” would be the next report. “I never saw a dog that would leave food sitting that long.  I wonder what somebody did to him.  Must have been really awful!”

A couple of months went by, and it was time to try something different.  “We started putting a tranquilizer in his food today, hoping he’ll fall asleep and we can get him back into the kennel where we could handle him, but he’s not touching the doctored stuff,” Dad ranted in frustration.  “He’s going to starve to death before he eats that tranq.  I don’t what else to try!”

Then something began killing sheep. In broad daylight. Almost every weekday.

“Another one today,” Dad reported, despondent.  “I have to go get feed or tractor parts, and I come back and there’s another animal dead.”

“That ewe was torn apart!  Torn apart, torn apart!” he wailed the next night. “It has to be something big, to tear up a mature ewe that much.  I called the game warden, and he came out and looked, and said it was dogs.  The dog warden came out and he said it would have to be a really large dog.  None of the neighbors have dogs that big, so he thinks that it had to be a bear.  ‘This close to the barn and house?’ I asked him.  He didn’t have an answer to that!” That was the usual finger-pointing in farm country, as officials try to protect their respective budgets from livestock loss claims.  And of course, you never can get the county dog-tag program or the state hunting-license program to pay the real cost of replacing that animal.

“‘They’re just stinkin’ sheep, it’s not like losing a cow,’” Dad imitated the county Board of Supervisors Chairman’s sneer almost perfectly.  “You know how those cattlemen feel about sheep. The Board will only authorize the cull-ewe price on the Cornell market reports, and that’s only after we argue about it another month or two or six.  Mutton price is less than a tenth of the cost of a ewe in her prime lambing years!”  Mutton or cull price was running about $30 for a head because no one sells a ewe still producing lambs.  Raising a ewe to lambing age was topping $300 and over a year of work.  Forget buying good breeding ewes ready to lamb. Those were at least $350, if you could find anyone willing to part with good blood.

The toll mounted. “Bear is not figuring out on his own that his job is protecting the sheep from predators,” Dad reported glumly.  He put a loaded rifle in his truck, hoping to catch this predator in the act, but the days passed without him catching the predator in the act.

Somewhere after the toll reached double digits, another terrible thought occurred to Dad.

“It has to be Bear!  He’s the only dog within miles large enough to tear up a hundred-and twenty-pound ewe like that!” Dad wailed during that night’s call.  “My own dog!  Trying to get him to eat that tranq must’ve pushed him over the edge!”

“I’m …  going … to have to … shoot … my own dog,” He could hardly force the words out.

The next night, I could hear the tears in his voice.  “I shot my dog!  My God, I shot Bear! Hardest shot I ever took….” Somehow, during those months of staring at each other across his food offerings had built a strange but strong bond.  Dad was grieving for this dog who had never trusted him enough to eat in his presence.

But the following night, he was nearly incoherent.  “It wasn’t Bear!  Another ewe got torn up today… this one inside the barn …  in broad daylight! I shot my dog and it wasn’t him!  It wasn’t him….” He choked on whatever else he was going to say.  The war veteran who had nearly always chosen rage over vulnerability was sobbing uncontrollably.  This time, guilt was mixed with grief, a toxic stew.

Dad decided that he wasn’t going anywhere until he found the real killer.  He kept the flock close to the house and barns, and his rifle with a round chambered.  He spent as much time as he could with the flock in the barn.

“I have to eat sometime,” he started the next Monday night’s call. “I went up to get a sandwich for lunch—I swear I was gone only minutes!  I looked out kitchen window and the ewes were pouring out of the barn. They ran to the end of the lot and stopped and turned to look back at the barn.  You know that stamping thing they do when they are preparing to protect their lambs?  Something was really wrong.  I took off running for the barn.  I could hear a commotion inside, a ewe bawling in pain.  And shrill barking.  It wasn’t one big dog—it was TWO dogs!  Two SPANIELS had taken down a ewe!  Inside the barn! One was ripping out her throat and the other was ripping the skin off her haunches!”  A shepherd’s nightmare, in broad daylight.

“A bush-axe was closer than my gun, so I grabbed that first and went after those dogs, hoping I would scare them enough to back off and give me time to grab them or get my gun,” he continued, still feeling the adrenaline.  “But they were crazy with the taste of blood.  I hit them hard with the back of that axe first, but they just would not let go of that ewe.  I finally turned it around and slashed one dog in the neck so bad he let go of her throat.  I got him so hard he went flying into the wall and stayed where he hit the ground.  Then I went for my gun.  When I got back, the other dog was still ripping away at that ewe like I’d never hit him!  I had to shoot him to make him stop. I didn’t have to shoot the other one:  I’d wacked his head half off with that axe.  He bled to death, I guess.  It was a mess.  Blood everywhere, between the ewe and the dead dogs.  I was too late to save the ewe.  She was a good one, too:  two sets of triplets in less than two years!”

The dogs were well-cared-for Springer Spaniels wearing collars and tags.  The kind of dogs that have pedigrees and professional grooming.  Dad called the phone number on the tags and left a message that he’d just had to kill the dogs in the act of killing his sheep.  My own experience with Dad’s brief, blunt phone messages had me visualizing what a shock that message had been to the dogs’ owners.

“This evening, a man and a woman showed up, in a BMW.  Don’t see many of those around here. I told them what I’d had to do and warned them that the barn was a gory mess, and if they hadn’t brought something to wrap the dogs up in to protect their car, I’d find them something.  But they brought blankets.  They were pretty shook up by what they saw.  They just stood staring at the dead ewe and the dead dogs and holding each other for the longest time.  Didn’t say a word.  I helped them bundle the dogs up in blankets and carry them to their car.  I told them I’d shot my own dog, thinking that it had to be a very large dog ripping up ewes like this, and Bear was the only really big dog in the area.  It had never occurred to me that two smaller dogs working together could tear up a ewe like that.  I guess those spaniels weighed maybe forty pounds each.”

“The man finally said that they had no idea that their dogs could do anything like this.  They are attorneys with a law practice in Charlottesville. They’d been letting the dogs out during the day while they went off to their office, thinking they would stay close to home.  That explains why the killing was only on weekdays.  It was a big shock to them that their precious pets were going so far, almost every weekday, to kill sheep. It must be four or five miles over the mountain to their place on White Oak Lake!”

Then Dad started choking up. “I said I felt bad for their children if the dogs were their pets,” he finally said. “And the woman—she’d been quiet the whole time—just burst into tears and ran to the car.  The man followed her and sat with her for a while.  When he came back, he said, ‘No children, just us.  We haven’t been able to have children. We got the dogs to help us deal with the empty house.’  So then I felt really, really awful.  I darn near lost it, too.

“But in the back of my mind, there’s this little voice saying, ‘TWO lawyers!  This is going to court and it’s going to be expensive!’  You know how many people tell you that ‘Dogs will be dogs, it’s their nature’ or ‘They were just playing with the sheep,’ like it’s your problem, not theirs.”  Well, I thought, the dog may be playing but the sheep are dying.  Or sacrificing their fetuses to throw the dogs off the chase.  People who don’t have sheep don’t get that you can lose next month’s entire lamb crop in one dog’s game.

“But then this lawyer says, ‘I’ve seen what our dogs did to that animal.  It’s horrible.  I love—I loved—those dogs.  They are—were—family.  I’m also really sorry for the loss of your sheep and your own dog.’ So, part of me is relieved that he’s not leading with the usual ‘Losing a few sheep to dogs once in a while is just the cost of doing business’ crap.  The other part of me is thinking, Sorry doesn’t pay the mortgage.”

“But then he surprised me,” Dad continued, telling the story just holding him together.  “You know what that lawyer said next?  He said, ‘I know the law. You acted within your rights to protect your livestock.  How many did they kill?  How much do we owe you?’  Well, I counted up the dead ewes and explained what it was going to cost to replace them,” Dad said.  “The man just wrote a check for that amount and handed it to me. ‘I have to get back to my wife now,’ he said as he left. ‘Think about what you had in your own dog, and I’ll come back to take care of that after we bury ours.’  But you can’t put a price on a dog easily, especially a rescue.  And that offer was beyond what the law required. So, I told him that paying for the ewes was enough.”

Finally out of words, I could hear Dad choking again, on the other end of the phone line.  Sobbing for Bear and his mistake, for fourteen dead ewes that he had helped raise.  And probably for the dogs that had meant so much to two naïve city transplants.

Dad had been to a war and killed people.  I never saw him cry for a person.  But somehow, it’s different when it’s an animal that you have taken responsibility for. It’s different when you’ve had to choose which of your animal friends live or die.

Bear was his last dog.