Episode 164: What People Need to Know About Raising Working Dogs

Welcome + Homestead Education Updates

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Homestead Education Podcast. I just want to remind you that you can get all of my homestead education books on my website for a new way of teaching agriculture to today’s youth and aspiring homesteaders by focusing on small-scale farming and self-sufficiency. They are also available on Etsy and through many state EFAs and charter programs. If you’re a school or co-op and need invoicing, please feel free to reach out to me directly.

Well, I have been gone for a minute. Y’all probably thought I died or something because I told you I was having surgery and hopefully everything would go well and I’d be back on next week. And I don’t think I actually was. So sorry for that one if y’all thought I died or something. But I did actually record a guest podcast in between there and released it. But I know sometimes you guys know I record those way in advance. But I did not die. I had my surgery, recovered pretty well. Then we had to turn right around and go down to Oregon. So my father-in-law could have surgery and then came home. We were home for just a few days getting ready for a craft show where I took my print stuff and our dog went missing. But that is what this entire episode is about. So I’m gonna get through some of our business first. And then I’m gonna pop back down to that.

So first off, we are now printing almost all of our products in our new print shop and working on reformatting the rest. So our orders are just flying out faster than ever. And it’s super fun. A lot of people have been sharing them on Instagram and TikTok. And we always send out stickers and we make all of those stickers or design them. I send them out to be made. But our Christmas ones right now are actual animals on our farm. So it just makes it a little bit more fun, a little bit more personal touch. But I think we’re about out of those, even though it’s not quite Christmas.

But we’ve gotten a lot of sales on our new Christmas on the homes or not Christmas on the home set. I’m sorry. The agricultural history of Christmas has just, I almost can’t print them fast enough. Which is super amazing because I love the concept of being able to teach kids about where our food comes from, with that focus on what’s happening in real life for them. And holidays are just such a perfect way to do that. And it’s so eye-opening. I’ve been teaching this in a history course that I teach for homeschool kids. They’re five to 12 year olds. And their wow moments of realizing how these things work together has just been so rewarding.

Anyways, with that, I have a lot of excellent Christmas gifts that you guys can get from me. We’re right on that cusp of being able to actually make it to your house with physical products. But almost everything is available digitally. And then you’d be printed out yourself. People still like gifts as downloads too. You make your own little thing to download, with designs on it and stuff. It’s super fun.

Just a reminder of the things that we have that work really great. So we have student planners now that are amazing. Because not only do they focus on you can be a homeschool or public school kid. They’re undated because everybody’s running on a different schedule. They have room for where the kids are doing their sports and their extracurricular activities, their farm chores. But it also includes where they can track their livestock projects, whether that’s through 4-H or FFA or just something they’re doing at home. It’s about four or five pages in there. So it’s not something you use. That’s fine. You can just skip over that piece. There’s a place that really encourages kids to start their own businesses where they can budget, where they can have their own homestead projects. It’s just a really great way to get them involved in what’s going on and for them to keep track of the things that they’re doing. More geared for high schoolers. I’m trying to work on getting one out for younger kids, but it just hasn’t come to fruition yet.

The other one is of course, I have my Christmas unit. That’s been a lot of fun. A lot of families have been getting it and doing it now. Some families plan on doing it that week in between Christmas and New Year’s. So don’t miss out on grabbing that because I’m going to take away all my holiday units after the holidays. I’ll probably do one for Valentine’s Day. I’ll definitely do one for St. Patrick’s Day. But just kind of keep an eye open for those. The survival unit that comes with, you can get a kit that goes with it that has all the supplies. That’s a really fun Christmas gift. I have storybooks. I have a coloring book. I have activity books. And I have my Raising Self-Sufficient Kids. That’s a book for parents on how to raise self-sufficient kids and our story. And I’m just really raw in it. We’re a blended family and we’re a homestead family. So there’s just a lot of extra that can be brought to the table with that book.

But don’t forget, we also have gift cards. So if you, for yourself or for a family member or something that you’re like, I know that this is something that somebody would want, you could definitely just do a gift card. I even have suggestions on the gift card page for if they have a child that’s this age or how many members in their family, like how big of a gift card you should grab. So hopefully that helps everybody out with their Christmas shopping for those hard to buy people that are homesteaders. And you’re like, I can’t afford a cow. But what’s the next best thing? Maybe some educational stuff from the Homestead Education.

We are shipping our meat now. So you can find that at the HannahHomestead.com. And also our print shop. Oh my gosh. So not only am I printing our stuff, I’m printing these beautiful journals and calendars and Christmas cards, Christmas tags, just all sorts of goodies. I’m expanding out as we go. I have these wonderful, I really love them. They are recipe journals and they’re like water resistant covers. And then inside you can journal about track and make adjustments on over a hundred recipes. You find recipes you like, you get them off Pinterest and you’re like, I have this piece of paper that’s just floating around. You write them in there. You can make your notes. You can add a little picture. You can add a link of where you found it. And it just makes for a really wonderful either gift for yourself or for somebody else.

I’m excited to start using mine for dairying where I can put all my notes about what temperature it is outside and what time of the year and whether what my cows are eating and that type of stuff. What temperature I got the milk to, all those things just to be able to keep better track of it and be able to just pull it right off the shelf when I’m in the kitchen. Anyways, you can find those. We do have a website. It’s porthillprinting.com. I’m in the process of transitioning from one host to another. So you might get to it and it just says we’re building right now. You can always find us on Facebook. It’s just porthillprinting, also on Instagram. And I have everything listed there. If it’s something you want to get, have me ship it to you. I can just shoot you an invoice. So it’s real simple still.

Ranger Goes Missing

Okay, so back to my dog. The day of the craft show. Well, I almost feel like I should back up. We have this or had this amazing livestock guardian dog, a great Pyrenees named Ranger. He’s actually more of a farm guardian because we’ve always allowed him to be a member of our family. But he doesn’t live in the house. He has a nice setup in the garage that he sleeps during the day and stuff. At night, he’s been on patrols. We’ve never lost an animal to a predator. He’s actually protected me and my kids a few times from things. Just a really, really great dog. But my husband was out of town.

And one night I heard something big in our yard. I don’t know what it was. Our dogs barked all night long. We also have four large labs. So they kind of just lounge around. But then the great Pyrenees would sound off and they would go join him. So I never was worried about him being alone against any predators. And something was big. There was something big in our yard.

My husband was out of town. I thought maybe it was we have a pasture right by the house, in a canyon where some of our larger Hereford pigs are. They’re about 900 pounds. So when I heard something really large in the yard, I thought, oh man, the pigs are out. And so I went out. I had a flashlight, looked around. No pigs. And dogs are hair up looking on the side of the house. I was like, yeah, I’m not going out there. And so I kind of called the dogs back. They barked all night long. And this went on for a few days.

So my husband came home. He was down in Oregon with his dad. He came home and I was telling him about this. And he’s like, OK, well, I’ll keep an eye. And the dogs got into it again with something. They were losing their minds like that again. And the next morning, our livestock guardian had a hurt foot, he couldn’t even put any pressure on it. He was hiding in our laundry room, which is something that he didn’t really do a lot. He’d come in there sometimes on really hot days because we have a doggy door right there. And my husband went in to try to be like, OK, buddy, you got to get out of the laundry room so the kids can get in here and do their thing. And he was kind of aggressive with my husband, which it was because he was hurt. And because we don’t treat him like a pet, he doesn’t have the same pet manners. So the only way he knows how to say, hey, I’m hurt and I don’t want to move was by growling. And he would stand up and just yelp and cry. And we’re like, OK, let’s keep an eye on him. And if he’s not better by tomorrow, we’ll get him into the vet.

He wasn’t real easy to load up in the car and take to the vet. He’s 130 pounds. And like I said, just doesn’t have the manners of a house dog. So the next day, he seemed totally fine. Like he favored it a little bit, but he was good. But one of our labs, she had a big cut on her nose that swelled up. It looked like she got bit by a stung by a bee or something. So I was like, they’re out there fighting something. Two mornings later, we woke up and Ranger had blood all over his face, like his entire muzzle. Up to his ears, under his eyes. But we checked him out and it wasn’t his blood. So I was like, man, what is going on? But we had to hurry up and get out the door to the craft show.

We got home that evening. You know, it gets dark at like three thirty up here in North Idaho. So we get home and we are inside and we’re kind of chatting and we’re like, has anyone seen Ranger? We don’t see him all the time, because especially getting home after dark, he’s already out kind of doing his patrols. We’re on 40 acres. We do not have our entire 40 acres dog fenced. It would be almost impossible. But he doesn’t really go that far. We’ve had a neighbor once in a while be like, oh, I got home and he was at my house. I gave him a treat. But for the most part, he stays just right on our property.

So, yeah, we were kind of like, where’s Ranger? We go outside. We call him. He doesn’t come. Whatever. Not that big of a deal. He’s already on his patrols. We’re on 40 acres and it’s kind of a lot of it’s hilly. And if he was down by the pond or something, he would never hear us calling for him. So we’re like, oh, well, he’ll be home in the morning.

Well, we got up in the morning and he wasn’t home. We went for a drive around the neighborhood. We’re pretty rural, but it’s a farming community. But as soon as you get outside of our little bit of a farming community, it’s wilderness, like deep wilderness. There are grizzlies and no road access. And it’s not like we could just go for a driver for a walk and look for him. But we spent two really solid days looking for him. Our entire property, the drainage ditches. We talked to Border Patrol. We talked to the sheriff’s department and just nothing. And we’re like, do we even want to post this on Facebook? But we decided, we really want to try to get him back. Not only is he an amazing working dog, he’s just a really sweet boy. And of course, we just want our dog back. So we decided to post it on social media.

What People Get Wrong About Working Dogs

And I’m going to pause on that for just a moment. I grew up with working dogs, more so than a lot of people. My dad was a hunting guide. We hunted wild boar in California. That’s where we lived was in California, but very rural California. My dad was a pig hunting guide. People came from all over the country. We even took Ted Nugent hunting one time. And my dad ran dogs on pigs, for catch dogs, bay dogs. Catch dogs is where the dogs would actually catch the pig and hold it there until you got there. Bay dogs would find the pigs and stay back and bark at them to keep them from moving. Some of them we use dogs for tracking. If we had we were looking for an animal or we had a wounded animal.

Ranger was actually the first livestock guardian dog that was mine to raise. We bought books. We watched YouTube videos. I called friends that I had worked with down in California with the cattle and the sheep. You know how they handle their livestock dogs, whether or not we should raise them as a livestock guardian or if we should raise them as a farm guardian, which there is a difference. Livestock, you almost have no contact with them. You raise them as though they are livestock. We’re on the flip side. We raised ours as a farm guardian, which means he can be a member of the family. He can guard multiple types of animals.

One of them is that we allowed him to have some matting around his neck. Some people find that controversial. The thing is, though, that matting around their neck, their fur, when it starts to mat is very similar to felted wool. You almost can’t even cut through it. And with that up around his neck, if he were to get into a fight with a cat or a grizzly, that would help actually protect them from bites.

There are 12 Great Pyrenees missing in North Idaho right now. And I was like, how many people just don’t understand what it’s like raising working dogs? And even people who own a working breed, that does not mean that they are raising a working dog. People buy a Border Collie because they think they’re cute and try to raise them in an apartment. Unless you’re taking that dog for a run like three times a day, they are going to destroy your home. They need room to run and they need a job. Like a J-O-B job. They need something to do constantly.

Wrap-Up + Farm Protection + Asking for Suggestions

And then there’s the concept of we have nobody guarding our farm right now. And I don’t like the way that feels. So if you have some suggestions on stop gaps for protection until we can find a replacement or maybe I’ll even get lucky and our dog will come home because it hasn’t even been a full two weeks yet, but I worry. But if you have suggestions for me, I would love them. I hope you got something out of this and I hope you all keep growing. Talk to you in a week or so. Bye.