Well hello there! This is Krista with episode #131 on the Wag Out Loud pawdcast. I just learned this about how dogs greet each other, and I just had to share it. Female dogs are more likely to greet other dogs by smelling their snout or their muzzle first, while males go for the genital region. So pay attention on your next dog walk, you might be able to quickly determine the sex of the other dogs who greet your dog, just based on this behavior. Give it a try.

Welcome to the Wag Out Loud pawdcast, where we are obsessed with bringing you helpful tips on canine health care, nutrition, and overall wellbeing. If you'd like to support the show, check out the amazing online events, products and resources that I personally recommend on the Wag Out Loud website. I'm your host, Krista and I'm super excited to be bringing you yet another tail wagging episode.

Hello dog lovers and welcome to yet another informative episode of The Wag Out Loud pawdcast. And I am so excited to learn from our guest, Jan Dohnor who is going to enlighten us on what in the world is a livestock Guardian dog? Jan, I'm so glad you're here today because I never knew that there was such a thing as a Livestock Guardian Dog (LGD). So if you could introduce yourself, and tell us all about it, you know what got you interested in these specific types of dogs.

Jan Dohner is an author of Livestock Guardians: Using Dogs, Donkeys, and Llamas to Protect Your Herd; Farm Dogs: 93 Guardians, Herders, Terriers, and other Canine Working Partners; and The Encyclopedia of Animal Predators. Jan lives on her family farm and has 40 years of hands-on experience with the use of livestock guardian dogs for predator control and working farm dogs. Jan is also a longtime member of the American Livestock Conservancy and the Kangal Dog Club of America.

Hi, sure. I'm a librarian and an author and a farmer. And I live on a small farm in Michigan with my husband, we've been here quite a long time. And one of the things we were doing on our farm was raising to start breeds of livestock. And we were starting to have problems with predators. And then this sort of light bulb went off in my head that I had remembered when I was a girl and madly in love with dogs. And like many other kids, that I had read about the Great Pyrenees, which was a Livestock Guardian Dog from France, and most people are familiar with the breed. And all I could think of was, that's what I need, right? This was back in the late 1970s. And the idea of using these ancient breeds for their purpose again, which is as a working as a Livestock Guardian Dog was just starting to come back sort of into public consciousness. This was not a thing that we had done here in America or Canada. This is an old world tradition, mostly among people who take flocks up into the mountains, you know, in the summer to graze, or people who are migratory with livestock, and they're native to a sort of a band of countries from Spain, and Portugal, Southern France, Italy, and all the way on over into Central Asia. And it's all these same types of people. Well, back in the 70s and 80s, when our native predators began to be, you know, resurge themselves, because we were now protecting them, right? People here in America thought, you know, we're gonna have to think of, you know, sort of sustainable living, non violent sort of ways of living better coexisting with predators. And this idea of this old world job for dogs, which was, as a Livestock Guardian, you know, started to come back and all over the country in the 80s. And 90s, people started, you know, thinking about this again, and writing about it and groups started getting together and talking and I guess, I was kind of in that mix from the beginning. And I've gone on to write several books about dogs, working dogs, I've written a book about the use of Livestock Guardian Dogs, and other livestock guardian animals, and farm dogs in general and historic breeds of livestock. So these two things a