The Boskop Dogs

I’ll bet no-one ever expected me to write something in my blog about dogs, but due to the dire lack of domestic cats around here I just have to make do. Boskop is the farm where I live with a few other people, it is about 8km from CCF centre, but the farm belongs to CCF. It’s quite a pretty place to live – an old farm house with what used to be a nice garden (still some big trees around) with the Waterberg Plateau as a backdrop. The place is surrounded by a fence, and you have to go through a double gate system to get in – not because of crime (there is none here) but because of our fellow inhabitants, the dogs.

The dogs here are all Anatolians/Kangals that were at some time in their lives used as livestock guarding dogs. Whether to call them Anatolians or Kangals is a rather complicated story that only dog breeders claim to understand. Apparently, when American biologists were looking for livestock guarding dogs in Europe, they came across a breed of dog in Turkey. These dogs generally had a yellowish coat (rather similar to yellow Labradors), were rather large, and some of them had black muzzles (others were completely yellow). As the region in Turkey where they found these dogs is known as Anatolia, when they imported the dogs to the U.S. they called them Anatolian shepherds. What they didn’t know, though, was that the Turks called the “Anatolians” with black muzzles Kangals and those with yellow muzzles Akbash dogs. What makes it more confusing for us at CCF, is that the dogs that were originally imported from the States were called Anatolian Shepherds, and they were all yellow with black muzzles. Recently, we obtained dogs from Kangal breeders – these dogs are significantly bigger than our other ones, they also have a longer, greyish coat and rounder heads (also with black muzzles, though). Hence, we still call our older dogs Anatolians and our new imports Kangals.

Now that you’re thoroughly confused, let me tell you about our Boskop dogs. Until yesterday, we had three of them: Tyger, Timone and Spots. Tyger is an old (12 years) female Anatolian that used to be one of our breeding dogs and has given us many puppies over the years that have become good guarding dogs (Tyger herself was no slouch). She’s now a retired old lady that is a bit large around the girth. Timone is an ex-guarding dog that was confiscated from the farm where he was placed as he was fed a very poor diet as a puppy (resulting in poor bone growth and thus skew back legs) and we strongly suspect that he was abused as well. Apparently, when we got him he was very aggressive and would bite anyone that touched him (very unusual for an Anatolian); he’s also terrified of water. Today, he’s a very friendly dog, who is calm even around strangers and is very fond of our couch!

Then there is Spots – an absolute nutcase of a dog. He is one of our imported Kangals that was going to be used in our breeding programme, but it all went a bit wrong for poor old Spots… After receiving him and bringing him up in the goat kraal with the goats and sheep (standard practice for guarding dogs), he started losing all his fur. It turns out he had an allergic reaction to something in the goat kraal. This is not a particularly good trait for a livestock guarding dog that is meant to live his whole life in the kraal and father puppies that would live their lives in goat kraals. The unfortunate consequence of Spots’ allergy was that they had to remove him from the kraal, place him at Boskop and neuter him.
The end result: we have an enormous two-year old dog that still thinks he’s a puppy and is bored out of his mind because he doesn’t have any goats to guard. He’s also very intelligent (although he acts like he’s got nothing between his ears, sometimes) and has figured out how to open doors. His favourite trick is to open the door to the house or to someone’s room and take anything that looks interesting and go and dump it/chew it to pieces outside. Needless to say, his trick isn’t all that popular with us – especially when we have to go and hunt around outside for one of our shoes or clothes… As a counter measure, we lock our bedroom doors (luckily I can, some of our doors don’t have locks, and Matt lost his keys a while ago) and all the other house doors – quite a mission in a place that’s not designed to be locked up. Some doors can only be locked from one side and others can’t be locked at all so we have to barricade them with chairs and anything else that comes to hand. Anyway, Spots is really just a big goofball and a really good-looking dog with silvery fur and a curled up bushy tail – no-one can be angry with him for too long.

Our most recent addition to the “Boskop pack” is Penda. Penda is an Anatolian-mongrel cross (she looks like a small, stocky Anatolian) that is one of our current breeding females. She’s been removed from the goat kraal because she’s caused some goat deaths in the past and has developed the bad habit of hunting game. Furthermore, one of our other breeding females, Cazgir (another imported Kangal), hates Penda with a passion and they fight at every given opportunity. Cazgir is about three times Penda’s size, so it’s not exactly an even match – Penda was quite badly injured in their last fight a few days ago. To make things just a bit more complicated, Tyger and Penda had a pretty bad track record with each other when Tyger was still in the kraal. We introduced Penda to the other Boskop dogs yesterday: she gets on like a house on fire with Spots (who’s smitten with her), she’s not at all keen on Timone (the feeling’s mutual) and, surprisingly, she mostly ignored Tyger. So then there were four… With luck, they will all live in peace and harmony (Timone has injured Spots quite badly in the past) and we will be able to keep our possessions away from Spots.

A quick word for Anatolians/Kangals – I came here expecting to find dogs that were only good with livestock and would only allow the herder to come near them. They’re big, imposing dogs that you wouldn’t want to mess with at the best of times, and I expected them to be aggressive like Boerbuls or Rotweilers. I couldn’t have been more wrong if I tried. I’m generally not a fan of big dogs, but these Anatolians are quickly winning a place in my heart. All the dogs I’ve met, both at CCF and on the farms where we’ve placed them, have wonderful friendly temperaments. Even dogs that are not handled at all by people on farms do not act aggressively when approached in a friendly manner – if anything these dogs are weary of humans.

Our breeding dogs at CCF have all been well socialized and are lovely creatures. Cazgir takes the cake as my favourite – she’s not yet two years old and is the biggest dog in the kraal by quite a distance (her shoulder height is just above my waist line). She’s perfectly calm around the livestock and a real honey to the people she knows. At the very slightest hint of danger to her goats she puts herself between the threat and the livestock and barks her head off – excellent guarding traits. Another little addition we’ve had to our dogs at the kraal is our latest imported Kangal – Hediye (pronounced Hay-dee). She’s only three months old but is growing fast; looking at the size of her paws I won’t be surprised if she rivals Cazgir for size one day. I’m currently walking with Hediye and the livestock every morning to try and teach her to stay with the goats; hopefully some of Cazgir’s good behaviour will rub off on the little creature.

So, there you have it, my two cents worth on guarding dogs. That doesn’t mean that I don’t still prefer cats though – felines are still far superior in my mind!