STEAMBOAT SPRINGS — If Old MacDonald had a farm in Colorado these days, he’d want some of the livestock guardian dogs Jan and Pat Stanko breed.
The couple, who own Emerald Mountain Ranch outside of Steamboat Springs, breed Turkish Boz Shepherds that can weigh 180 pounds as adults and hold off a predator, yet have the joyful exuberance of a puppy with a package of pig ears.
On websites dedicated to their breed, Boz are described as “even tempered, calm and assured,” as well as “not easily startled, timid or anxious.” They have “a stronger need to love and be loved by (their) family than other breeds,” and they can be “so quiet while sitting or lying near their flock,” they look like a giant stuffed animal.
These descriptions proved true on a blustery day in August when three Boz puppies from one of the Stankos’ litters poked their 6-month-old noses through a pen they shared with several Nigerian Dwarf goats. The female pups — Leona and May — weighed around 80 pounds, while their lanky brother, Brinks, approached 100. Their ears had been cropped at birth, because Boz can get to playing so hard they’ll shred each other’s ears, and also because cropped ears are one less thing a predator can grab onto in a fight, Jan said. But it was hard to imagine these pups fighting anything as their tails wagged in loose circles while Jan delivered pats on their heads and when they snuggled up to “their” tiny goats to take a nap.
“A Boz puppy’s happy place is curled up with its mother, siblings, livestock or on a lap,” Jan said later. But her adult Boz are ready to stand down any bear, bobcat, mountain lion, coyote or wolf that sneaks onto the Stankos’ 40-acre ranch looking for a chicken, calf, lamb or guinea hen.
Boz are perfect for protecting ranches and homesteads because “they’re a little stickier” than other livestock guardian dog breeds when it comes to staying close to livestock, she added, and “they tend not to go after predators but try to keep predators away.” They do this by staying hyperalert at night, marking the perimeter of a herd with their scent, barking in a way that says “Oh, no you won’t,” and effectively creating a dog fence predators feel too wary to approach. “But Boz have a switch,” Jan said, and when it’s flipped they can fight.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been working to get livestock guardian dogs, or LGDs, in Colorado ranchers’ hands since 2020. Some ranchers have been slow to give them a try due to costliness, training challenges, time investment and some dogs’ reputation for being aggressive. But Wildlife Services, within the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, believes they’re an important link in helping ranchers dealing with wolves reintroduced to Colorado during the winters of 2023/24 and 2025.
And now a Colorado group led by a scientist focused on nonlethal coexistence is working to create a sort of rapid-response team of guardian dogs, like those bred and trained by the Stankos, that can be loaned to ranchers with predator problems on a case-by-case basis. The idea is to keep ranchers from having to commit to the dogs while guaranteeing the dogs a good life.
Boz beginnings
Before moving to Steamboat Springs, Jan and Pat lived on a homestead between Berthoud and Loveland, where their Anatolian and Great Pyrenees mix, Mr. Bojangles, had no problem protecting their animals.
But when they settled on the 120-year-old ranch outside of Steamboat where Pat grew up, and “three bears came in one night, we saw the writing on the wall that these predators were different and that one livestock guardian dog wasn’t going to work,” Jan said. So she got a Maremma guardian dog from a local sheepherder, “but she wasn’t quite big enough for our needs.”
She started researching other breeds and thought she wanted Caucasian Shepherds. “But to be honest, they’re not people friendly and they need to be because we have so much tourism,” she said.
Great Pyrenees weren’t ideal either, said Pat, recalling a 2008 incident in Colorado when two attacked a mountain biker, who filed (and won) a $1 million lawsuit against their owner.
And Turkish Kangals, a close relative of Boz, weren’t right, “because they’re more of a perimeter dog” that like to work the woods at night, while the Stankos wanted “something that would try to keep predators away and only engage if they had to,” Jan said.
She settled on a Boz pup, fell in love, bought another and started researching how to breed them. Soon she was headlong into it, and as her dogs grew, she saw their remarkable traits. Like Maverick, who became “an incredible mentor to the younger pups,” she said. And Nova, the “‘sky watcher,’ always alert to hawks and eagles” known to swoop into a herd and carry off a baby lamb. Porsche lives full time with sheep and goats, and is starting to show promise with poultry. And the puppies in the calf pen lick the calves as they eat while waiting to slurp up their leftovers.
Suzanne Asha Stone, co-founder and executive director of the International Wildlife Coexistence Network and leading researcher in nonlethal coexistence, has worked with livestock guardian dogs in Idaho for 20 years. She says she’s seen scenarios where a guardian dog raised with a herd of sheep will be inseparable from the ewe that effectively raised it, then bond to the ewe’s offspring, “even if mom passes. Her children will be sacred to that dog.”
But even the most loving dogs will fight a predator when push comes to shove, and Doug Bruchez, who owns a sprawling ranch near Kremmling, calls the state’s congressionally funded livestock guardian dog program “government-funded animal abuse.”
“Putting dogs out with the specific purpose of fighting or killing transplanted wolves is animal abuse,” he said. “I would never intentionally put an animal in harm’s way.”
Stone says some people will train dogs to be aggressive — with devastating results.
“They think the high-end aggressive dogs that will pursue and try to attack wolves are the best,” she said. “But I’ve only seen that end up with the results of dead dogs, even if the dogs might injure or harm wolves along the way.”
Stone’s Wood River Wolf Project experienced a “train wreck” with this in 2007, she said, when 1,000 sheep and their accompanying guardian dogs were released on a summer grazing allotment too close to a den where wolves were raising pups. The wolves killed 12 sheep and a dog.
Properly trained dogs are supposed to function as “an alarm system to let people know wolves are nearby, and then once the herders (or ranchers) are alerted, they can come out with their air horns or their flashlights that then scare the wolves off,” she added. “I mean, the point of the dogs is that they are a nonlethal tool, and that means not only nonlethal for wolves, but nonlethal for the dogs.”
The Stankos follow the same ideology, and now have 12 adults and “a bunch of pups” Jan said she’s testing to see if they have the right qualities to become livestock guardian dogs in training.
At 5 weeks old the week of Oct. 1, the newest litter had been walking around for only a week and “their little personalities (were) just starting to come out,” she said.
But if they prove up, they could go to ranchers and homesteaders wanting another nonlethal tool to keep wolves away, in addition to bright flags on fencing called fladry, herd police on horseback called range riders, and all manner of flashing lights, talking boxes and flying drones some argue aren’t enough.
USDA tries LGDs
In both 2020 and 2021, Wildlife Services received $1.38 million in Congressional funding to expand its research and increase the implementation of nonlethal livestock protection projects including range riders, fladry, electric fencing and guard dog projects in 13 states. Colorado received $35,000 for one part-time specialist to help place Kangals with cattle and sheep producers in 2021.
By then, the agency had been studying livestock guardian dogs for more than a decade, hoping to find a breed “that would readily investigate potential threats to the herd, remain vigilant, be able to decipher a threat from an unthreatening stimulus, and that was, most importantly, friendly to humans,” say agency documents.
They initially chose Kangals from out-of-state breeders to guard livestock operations where large carnivores were present. They placed 15 of these dogs between 2020 and 2021 with producers in four counties, including six dogs that went to areas with wolf activity.
In 2021, the agency reported having “a good amount of success … based on anecdotes from participants.” There were “a few issues,” the report said, “but by far the feedback we’ve received about the dogs and in turn the service we provide is overwhelmingly positive.” Participating wool growers told them the dogs worked well with sheep and ran off predators.
The biggest problem with the dogs, according to the report, was that they were “too friendly” with people, resulting in two “being picked up by recreationists and taken to the local shelter.” For that reason, they were microchipped to their new owners.
But in April 2024, the agency brought its livestock guardian dog procurement in state, working with Colorado breeders to match specific breeds (Boz, Kangals, Karakachans) with producers, their operations, comfortability with training and the specific traits of the dogs, the documents say.
The results since then have been mixed, as The Coloradoan reported. Jan believes that’s partly because “in the beginning, at least,” the program “was very raw,” with Wildlife Services giving ranchers pups that were less than 12 weeks old.
The agency later failed to give ranchers the educational resources “to deal with the dogs as they entered their teenage years,” she said.
“They go through stages where you’re like, ‘What are you doing? Like, you were good and now you’re trying to jump the fence.’” Not all Boz are good with all animals, “like Maru,” a black brindle rescued from California. “Maru eats turkeys,” she added.
But in general, the Boz the Stankos are breeding, training and selling are doing a good job at protecting livestock.
Ayla Chaco owns a 37-acre homestead near Glenwood Springs frequented by bears, lions, bobcats and foxes. In a text to The Colorado Sun, she called her two Boz from Stanko litters, “a huge asset” to keeping both her “free range animals (& kids) from being lunch.
“Before them we lost everything we tried to raise, minus the kids. Now we don’t have any issues and feel good knowing they are safe to play outside under the watchful eyes of Reina and Tavo.”
Emily Blizzard, who directs USDA’s Wildlife Services in Colorado, was unable to discuss the Stanko dogs because she was furloughed by the federal government. But Jan said the new litter has been “promised to the USDA,” and if the agency does end up taking them, it will place them with a sheepherder “to do more training with stock” before they go to producers, to improve their probability of success.
And recently a scientist and innovator named Chip Isenhart presented the Stankos with a new idea the three of them, and others, think can change everything.
Expanding Boz territory
In April 2024, Wildlife Services said it had begun building a support network with Colorado breeders to help teach producers about their livestock guardian dogs. It also created a livestock guardian dog community webpage “to help both the livestock guardian dogs and producers have a good foundation from which to build,” it says.
Jan and Pat contribute to that effort by getting their dogs, which cost between $2,000 and $3,000 depending on the litter, working or breeding program and bloodlines, to ranchers who can buy them through a 50/50 cost-share agreement with Wildlife Services. They’ve also started working with Colorado State University’s Center for Human-Carnivore Coexistence “to get some educational stuff out there, too, so it’s not just ‘here’s your dog,’ but if they have questions or run into problems, they have some support,” Jan said.
If a rancher or homesteader wants a dog from Wildlife Services, they’re encouraged, but not required, to fill out a suitability assessment.
Once received, Wildlife Services and a breeder review the rancher’s proximity to wolves, the probability of wolf-dog interactions, characteristics of available pups and whether a pup or puppies are needed given their circumstances.
And once pups are placed with a producer, outreach, information and support are provided along with vet vaccinations, spay/neuter visits and followup check-ins by Wildlife Services.
Even though the program seems to be gaining speed, Jan said she and Pat “get mixed messages from producers on just how much work they have to put into these dogs. Like, you can’t just get them and throw them out and think that they’re gonna stay with the animals.”
Tiffany Larson, who runs a rescue for abandoned livestock guardian dogs in Idaho, says this type of “old school thinking” isn’t unusual in her state.
Over 11 years, her Unega Mountain Dog Rescue has rescued 500 “strictly livestock guardian dogs” whose owners decided they were too much, or the dog didn’t understand its job or wouldn’t do it, so the producer left it behind, she said.
“Once the puppy is weaned from its mom, it’s thrown into a sheep pen or a goat pen, or whatever it might be, and the dogs aren’t touched,” she added, describing bad practices. “They receive no love. They receive no pets. So what ends up happening (is) (the producer) goes to load up the sheep in a semi, to move the sheep to a different allotment, and then they’re trying to catch the dog, and they can’t catch the dog because they can’t touch the dog.”
The same happens in Colorado. Last week a man called Larson because he had seen a Great Pyrenees wandering alone on a grazing allotment near Meeker and had tried to lure the dog in with some food. He said he couldn’t capture the dog, and was seeing it “every few days still patrolling the areas where the sheep were over the summer.”
The man said the producer on the allotment told him they’d be back for the dog. “I’m like, ‘yeah, they’re never coming back,’” Larson said.
But she said what the Stankos and a similar-minded Boz breeder in Colorado are doing sounds great.
And soon, ranchers may have an easier way to benefit from their work.
A rapid deployment livestock guardian dog team
Not long ago, Isenhart rolled up the Stankos’ driveway.
He’d created an organization called Wild Ranch, with the aim of “bridging the urban-rural divide for working wildlands and ranch families” in Colorado and to create new approaches to predator-livestock conflict.
Among innovations he’s working on are satellite-smart tags for livestock capable of alerting a producer to predator detection; AI cameras that can discern if a wolf is present and automatically trigger a deterrent (think strobe light or human voice); livestock collars equipped with solar-powered satellite tracking devices; and a custom app for range riders and ranch owners that will help them predict, coordinate and respond to wolf-livestock interactions.
Of specific interest to the Stankos was Isenhart’s idea to create a “special team” of Boz specifically for Wildlife Services that could travel by plane, truck or trailer, to “help manage predator-livestock hot spots,” like ones ranchers in Grand and Pitkin counties have endured, with multiple livestock attacks by the Copper Creek wolf pack over the past year and a half.
These dog teams would always travel with handlers, who would stay with them in the field while they created “a big, bad dog fence,” between predators and livestock, Isenhart told The Colorado Sun.
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“We’re not envisioning any physical contact with wolves, but the dogs will be able to stand down a pack of wolves that are chronically killing livestock,” he said. “That’ll allow time to have more strategic and less emotional management decisions in these hot spots.”
The Stankos for several years have been taking their dogs onto a 100-acre meadow they own and camped there with the dogs untethered outside their trailer. They wanted to see if their presence would deter coyotes during calving.
It did.
And they think they can apply the same tactic to wolves.
“Really, the overall concept is, can we bring a team of dogs between livestock and wolves to try to change the wolves’ behavior during predation,” Jan said. “We can. But we’d have to have an idea of how many wolves there are, because we’d have to have a big enough team of dogs that the wolves wouldn’t want to engage with them. What we don’t want is engagement.”
Whoever deploys the dogs to conflict areas will also have to deal with the problem of cattle that have been in contact with wolves unable to tolerate similar four-leggeds.
But Isenhart and the Stankos are buoyed by the idea of another tool that could help ranchers weather wolf reintroduction.
“It’s a twist,” not a “silver bullet,” Isenhart said. “But it could work.”