Wag-riculture: For the love of farm dogs

Water droplets dappled pastures and low-hanging clouds formed a garland around the trees. The morning air smelled earthy.

“Down. Good boy.”

The voice belonged to Piper Klinger, Marc’s owner, who runs this sheep ranch with her husband, Bob Klinger.

Bob, 77, has worked with sheep more than 50 years and made his name as Oregon State University’s sheep herdsman for decades before retiring to full-time ranching.

Publicly, the Klingers are known for high-quality Polypay sheep, innovative pasture management and “agrivoltaics,” meaning grazing sheep under solar panels. Privately, they say one of the most significant features of their farm is their dog, Marc.

One common thread many farmers share is their love for dogs. The farm dog, some say, is the “unsung hero,” “part of the family” and one of the most important parts of rural life.

In December and January, the Capital Press solicited stories from readers about their dogs. Some rescued animals or protected crops; others have simply brought joy to their owners’ lives. These are a few of their stories.

Marc

“Been doing sheep for some 50 years. Never thought I’d have a dog this good,” Bob Klinger told the Capital Press.

An old friend gave Marc to the Klingers last summer, when the dog was 2.5 years old.

The Klingers say Marc is the ideal working dog. Piper said he learned the commands to herd sheep “in no time at all.” Bob said Marc “works the sheep in the chute like a pro” for sorting and vaccinating. When the Klingers need to pass through a section of electric fencing, Marc keeps the sheep from escaping through the gap.

He intuitively knows which critters are friends and which are foes, they say; he hunts down mice and voles, but he lets the farm’s chickens climb on his head, and he recently befriended an otter in the creek.

Plenty of border collies are good working dogs, said Piper. What makes Marc unique, she said, is that although he enjoys herding, he’s not obsessed with it. Instead, he’s gentle, affectionate and sticks close to Piper’s side.

Piper smiled, scratching Marc’s head, as she described their first day together.

“When he hadn’t even been here an hour, he walked over to me, put his foot on my leg and looked at me like, ‘Here I am, I’m yours.’”

Sally

Pete Paradis scooped his 3-year-old grandson, Elias, off his lap and slid out of his truck. As the two approached the mouth of an alleyway that sloped through the vineyard, three white Maremma sheepdogs sauntered toward them.

Paradis said the smartest of the three — though a bit people-shy — is Sally.

“She’s not the nice little dog that comes up on your lap. This is about as far from that as you can be,” said Paradis. “She’s more like a farm animal, a domesticated wolf, if you will.”

Sally is a working dog, and she does her job well.

Her main role is to protect the Silverton farm’s 100 or so Boer meat goats against predators. Alone, she faces off coyotes. Alongside the other two dogs, Paradis said she can make cougars think twice.

Paradis said Sally’s intelligence startles him.

At dusk, she leads the goats to the barn or underneath trees. When it’s her dinnertime, she takes turns with the other two dogs, making sure one is always on watch duty.

Although her first duty is to her goats, Sally has also protected the vineyard. Paradis recalls one night, a storm-downed tree ripped open a fence. The goat herd could have entered the vineyard block and destroyed it, but Sally guarded the hole until her master arrived in the morning.

“Sally sat on the inside of the fence, looking at me like, ‘It’s about time you got here,’” Paradis said.

Athena

Mike Guebert and his wife, Linda Bangs, co-own Terra Farma, a small farm producing pasture-raised meat, eggs and milk in Corbett. They run a community supported agriculture program.

Ironically, Guebert and Bangs, who now run a meat operation, were once urban-dwelling vegetarians before they were exposed to humane livestock production methods.

The couple’s Great Pyrenees, Athena, guards their pasture-raised dairy cows, goats, pigs, poultry and waterfowl.

The couple recall that one night, Athena woke them up with persistent barking. Guebert said he threw on his boots and ran outside. There, he found two injured coyotes near the turkey pens, pieces of coyote skin and fur scattered about and Athena “sitting as if she’d been there the whole time.” Athena even showed her owners a portion of the fence that needed repair.

“She’s an amazing protector, and she’s also just the sweetest dog,” said Bangs.

Bangs squatted down, running her fingers through Athena’s white fur. They were on a green hill inside a multispecies grazing paddock where dairy cows and meat goats munched together.

The couple were so pleased with Athena that they wanted to pass on her genetics, so they bought a male dog, Zuri, and across about six months, Athena had two litters, 20 puppies total.

“She’s an amazing mom,” said Guebert.

Kit

Liana Livingston, 18, and her sister Emmeline, 11, say their dog Kit — named after American frontiersman Kit Carson — is one of the best parts of farm life.

Kit, a border collie-McNab shepherd cross, helps drive 120 or so beef cattle at a time on the family ranch in Starkey.

“It saves a lot of time when he helps move the cows,” said Liana Livingston.

The dog also scares away coyotes and even had a battle with an angry badger.

Although Kit’s a working dog, the girls say it’s his fun personality that makes life colorful.

Kit is 5, but the girls say he still acts like a puppy. After the Livingstons feed the cows and are about to put away hay strings, Kit likes to grab the strings’ ends and pull them for a game of tug-of-war. He also loves catching rocks and snowballs, and can shake hands and play dead.

When it snows, the Livingstons say, Kit is “very skilled at hooky bobbing.” The girls’ parents drive their truck through the snow, and the girls, along with their siblings and Kit, hook onto the bumper and squat down for a ride.

The only problem, Liana said, is that sometimes Kit grabs her pants while she’s holding onto the bumper.

“He definitely keeps farm life lighthearted,” she said.

Poppie

Robin Wylie, 64, who owns a ranch in Nampa, Idaho, and manages several farms across Eastern Washington, said her dog, Poppie, fills a hole she didn’t think anyone could fill.

When her previous dog died, Wylie was devastated.

“I said to my friend, ‘I don’t want to get another dog yet,’” she said.

But her friend ignored her comment and called her the next day to say she found another dog for her, a 10-month-old cross-breed that a cattle rancher was giving away.

“We really bonded,” she said.

Wylie said Poppie is incredibly smart and even knows the days of the week. Wylie’s daughter visits every Monday at 9 a.m. Each Monday just before that time, Poppie waits by the door for her arrival.

“How can she know what seven days is?” said Wylie.

Poppie helped Wylie’s heart heal after the loss of her previous dog, and she also brought life and laughter to the farm. She’s interested in everything and often sports a green manure mustache. She’s gentle with Wylie’s grandchildren, but she’s tough when she needs to be, driving away skunks, stray dogs and coyotes. When inside, Poppie often curls up under Wylie’s desk, keeping her owner’s feet warm. Poppie has some English shepherd in her, which Wylie suspects makes her a good “all-purpose farm dog.”

“She’s the most perfect farm dog I’ve ever had,” said Wylie.

Lily

Robin Loznak’s family lives on a 570-acre property with cattle, Douglas firs and hazelnut trees in Oakland. On a ridge overlooking the Umpqua River sits a farmhouse.

Founded in 1868 by Martha Poindexter Maupin, this is both a state-designated Century Farm and a Sesquicentennial Farm, owned and operated by members of the same family for 150 years.

This is also where Lily, a mixed-breed rescue with some border collie in her, lives.

Loznak used to work as a veterinary assistant at Umpqua Low-Cost Veterinary Services in Roseburg, so he had a relationship with Umpqua Valley Humane Society. Staff there knew he was looking for a dog, and one day, he got a call.

They had a rescue, they said, that had been raised in the city but was too high-energy for town.

“She was exactly right for us,” said Loznak.

It turns out, Loznak’s family was exactly right for Lily, too. She loves watching the cattle, keeping down the rodent population, swimming in the river and riding shotgun alongside Loznak in his Kubota UTV out to the hazelnut orchards.

Loznak said what strikes him is that although farmers on his land have raised a wide range of crops and livestock, one semi-constant fixture has been the farm dog. Most generations of his family had dogs, he said. He even has an old photograph, taken around the 1870s, that shows the original family on the farmhouse porch. At their side is a dog.

“There’s just something special about farm dogs,” said Loznak.