Ribstone Farm

Welcoming Sadie, the livestock guardian dog.

Today we get to welcome Sadie, our new livestock guardian puppy, to Ribstone Farm.  Sadie is a 3 month old 1/2 Maremma, 1/4 Pyrenees, 1/4 Akbash from a goat farm near Camrose.  This morning she will be introduced to some of our ewe lambs and will spend the next few months bonding with the sheep.  We have not experienced losses to coyotes or other predators amongst our sheep so far – we’ve been lucky and we’re grateful for it.  But we have lost many chickens, turkeys, ducks, and geese to dastardly wild canines and we don’t want them to start in on the sheep.  It’s one of the challenges of keeping small livestock out here in East-Central Alberta:  coyotes don’t pose much of a threat to cattle, but anything smaller than a calf must look like pretty easy pickings.

Sadie gets to join Napoleon the Llama and Hagar the Horse on guard duty.