Jakes Defence

This is my rant no need to read this if your in a good mood!

Here is the picture of our livestock guardian dog Jake. He's the big guy! Same picture in an earlier post.

In the past three weeks we have been confronted with a neighbor who is obviously afraid of him. They have lived next to us for five years. We did have trouble with our dogs wanting to guard the property's around us since that was their job before neighbors moved in closer, all of us on 10 or 11 acre parcels. With coyotes stray dogs and seeing cougars three times above our property in the 27 years here we definitely need a guardian dog or two. Now that the neighbors are closer and their dogs don't always get along with Jake he is confined to the front yard. He no longer can guard our back field because I can't guarantee he can't get out. So ends the guardian dog status so the sheep are penned next to the barn at night, and a skunk family moved into the barn. Another story. and they did leave. All this to help people to feel at ease and attempt to be good neighbors.

Jake has been in two fights in two years with their dog Junior because I left the gate open for friends to arrive. Both fights in front of our gate on a private road.

This last fight I was down there almost immediately to see what happened and the two of us her and I were not even sure the cut on Junior was worth a vet check. She decided to go to the vet four days later and we payed. But the day after the fight Animal Control was here and sighted us with a "dangerous dog" ticket. Unbelievable! the Officer who came even thought it sounded like a "dogs will be dogs" thing. No fine we were to go to court!

We went to court last Wednesday and could plead three ways innocent, guilty or no contest. I know Jake is not a dangerous dog, not guilty, no contest we would need to get a $50,000.00 insurance policy and keep Jake in a kennel with a cement floor and an 8 foot fence with a lid on it. That left innocent which sends us to court again with a lawyer needed to plead our case on January 5th.

This is a 9 year old dog with no priors. A few scrapes with other neighbor dogs. Raised to live with cats, chickens, sheep, bunnies and new lambs. The chickens run around the yard right where he sleeps and eats. Lambs get threw the fence when they are tiny and he just ignores them. He has NEVER given any other person a cause to think he would attack them. Until he knows you he stays back. We have a granddaughter, who grew up around him. I have school kids and 4-H kids here off and on. We had close to 50 Halloween trick-or-treaters here this year and he didn't even bark! And believe it or not we do have friends and family who visit us also! Nobody sees things like when the little Jack Russell Coco across the street came for a visit in our yard not so long ago and we just scooped her up and put her back over the fence in her own yard as Jake watched her in his yard.

These neighbors fear for their three year old son. It is freaky to have a big dog run down the driveway and bark at you. On the same note the father came up here once with the child in a stroller unannounced. This father was here to tell us after the first dog fight, about a year ago, that Jake is dangerous. Jake was out loose in the yard and after barking that they were here left to lay under the tree in the shade. Go figure! Are they really affraid for their son.

That's all, I'm going to take pictures of some of my new projects to blog about.