Livestock Guardian Dogs Protect Pastured Chickens

Fieldwork was conducted from 8 July to 23 August 2019 at Blue Tractor Farm in Glen Mervyn, Western Australia. The farm had been working as a commercial egg farm for about 2 yr at the time of this study, keeping pastured Isa Brown chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) layers. The owner had experienced substantial losses to predators in the year before acquiring the LGDs: on one night, 35 chickens were killed by foxes, another 15 on a separate occasion, and foxes were regularly seen both day and night. In addition, an estimated ~15 chickens were seen killed by raptors. Furthermore, uncounted numbers of chickens that flew out of the fenced paddocks (and could not be re-captured) were also likely predated, as they did not remain present for many days. In the subsequent year of operation, after getting two alpacas and then two LGDs, there were no reported losses to either foxes or raptors, and fewer foxes had been noticed on the property (a distinction in timing between the alpacas and LGDs was not made).
The property had three separate 50 × 50 m chicken paddocks (Figure 1) surrounded by solar-powered electric poultry fences and each containing a “chicken caravan” for egg laying and night-time roosting (Figure 2a). Paddock “M,” the focus of our work, contained two Maremma LGDs and 450 ~9-month-old chickens (Figure 2b). The 2-yr-old sibling LGDs (male: Hiro and female: Coco) had been acquired 1 yr previously from another open pasture chicken farm, where they had been raised amongst chickens. Paddock “A” contained two alpacas (which always remained within the confines of their paddock) and 500 ~6-month-old chickens (Figure 2c). There has been some reported success in protecting flocks of sheep by llamas (Lama glama) (Meadows and Knowlton, 2000 ) and the smaller alpacas (Mahoney and Charry, 2007 ); however, we are not aware of any test of the guardian value for poultry and we also did not have sufficient data to carry out a robust experimental design on this property. Both Paddock M and Paddock A were moved every 2 to 3 wk to an adjacent 50 × 50 m area for fresh green pick and foraging opportunities. Paddock “N” contained no guardian animal and the oldest chickens at ~18-months-old. Paddock N was not moved during the study as the chickens were being sold off; there were 68 chickens for the first 12 d of monitoring, 47 for the next day and then 25 chickens for the last 2 d of monitoring for this paddock.