I can’t help but stopping to watch these two Great Pyrenees protecting their sheep on a nearby farm. I can’t stay and watch too long as the dogs will bark and bark until I go away. I love how they constantly move to protect the sheep, staying between me and their charges. If I move, they advance; if the sheep move, they move, always ensuring they are between the sheep and me.
It’s a beautiful thing to see working animals work.
As long as I live, I will never understand the people who claim to love animals and be for their rights and the lobby with many millions of dollars from gullible people to keep working dogs and horses and ponies and elephants from working.
Once their work is taken away, they usually die out of sight or spend the rest of their lives driving manure in so-called preserves. The only place our children and grandchildren will ever see those wonderful elephants in the future is on YouTube. How sad. How can they learn to love animals if they never know any?
Whenever I put up photos of these beautiful dogs, someone e-mails me to accuse me of supporting animal abuse. How could these dogs be happy, they ask? No animal should be forced to work for human beings, I am told. How cruel that these poor dogs live outdoors all year and rarely interact with humans. For working dogs, that’s an almost perfect life.
“How can you glorify this cruelty, “JSC messaged me earlier in the work,” this is just another form of slavery and exploitation!” I suggested to her that was enabling socially enhanced slaughter. She claimed that I was vicious. I took it as a compliment.
People tell me all the time that all of those domesticated elephants whose only life was working in circuses until the animal rights movement spent many millions of dollars forcing them out are now leading wonderful lives in vast and mostly mythical elephant shelters. Hundreds of elephants were driven from the circuses, a handful can be accounted for in “preserves.”
Their former handlers know that almost all of those animals are put down because no one can afford to care for them and without circuses, they have no work to do.
They’ve never lived in their native habitats, which are being overrun by development, climate change, and poachers. They lost their best chances for a safe and healthy life. When working animals lose their work, they vanish, that history is clear enough. Wherever working animals go, ignorant human beings manage to get them killed. That includes the ponies who used to give rides to small children. That is now targeted as abuse as well.
And they get millions of gullible but good-hearted people to believe them.
What is truly abusive is to keep these dogs from their work and their destiny. Seeing those Pyrenees dogs is a very beautiful thing. I hope they never go away.
What a stain on the idea of preserving animals in our world. I’m sure people claiming animal rights would consider using these dogs to guard sheep – they do live outside with the sheep day and night and in all weather – as cruel and abusive. We will miss these working animals dearly when the people who claim to be for animal rights manage to drive them from the world.
I feel sorry for LGD’s that have become house pets with little to do except eat, sleep, take a walk. Most of them need to be outdoors, with a job. Their physical needs are certainly being met, but they are likely bored!
This essay needs to be repeated over and over again. Working animals need work. They don’t want to be fed and watered like a plant. Why is it so hard for people to understand this?
Good question Amy, I think the rescue movement, wonderful as it is, has implanted the idea that all animals are abused and that most people cannot be trusted. Part of the national disease, I think.
Those dogs do a good job protecting sheep from coyotes.
And wolves and stray doxes and foxes
But those protesting would get rid of the dog because it might destroy their house from boredom…
As I said previously my nephew has two of these dogs to watch over his sheep, and you are right Jon, that is their work and they love it! It is not abuse, what happened to Phoenix is abuse and should be punished! Pony rides at our county fair is one of my best memories! I would never have had the experience if others had not shared their pets. They rotated the ponies so they could r watered, fed, and rest in the shade. What I saw was good stewardship in taking care of their ponies.
I have a herd of goats and a great pyrenese. Sunny (the pyr) decided to quit his job and become a whole farm guardian instead of just guarding the sheep. He patrols our rural neighborhood, keeping everyone safe from the many deer, possum, bear, bobcat, etc. who also live here. About 3 times a week he likes to sleep in the house, but other than that, he’s outside where he prefers to be. He gets plenty of love and attention, he just decided what his job was going to be. Animal “rights” activists are terrorists of a different sort.
Working dogs need to work, period or they become bored and destructive. However, the person who wrote that their dog decided to no longer watch their goats and instead patrol the neighborholld “protecting” it from wildlife that is NOT their job, that is harassing wildlife who live there, and raise their young. That behaviour will give working dogs a bad name and the wrong idea to those who don’t understand what a working dog is suposed to do depending on its breed. Depending on your states laws, the owners can be held liable for wildlife harassment or death if he kills them. So unless you are hunting something in season with your dog, that is not its job, protecting YOUR livestock is its job. To clarify, I have working dogs, and no, I am not a ARA.