Ideas
Dogs in sheep's clothing
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Hampshire's Raymond Coppinger helps ranchers use special breeds to keep the wolves at bay.
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By John Yemma, Boston Globe
Raymond Coppinger was talking about predation, which happens throughout the animal world. Predation is normal, not evil, and the way humans cope with predators should be clever, not brutal. Coppinger is saying this as we sit in his fishing shack, where he plans what to him is recreation but to brook trout is felonious assault. The shack is attached to his farmhouse in the hills of Western Massachusetts.
Just then, Coppinger jumps up and shouts, ''Wow! I've never seen that before.'' I turn quickly but glimpse only a whisper of feathers drifting over the furrowed rows of a garden plot. Coppinger, however, has just witnessed a hawk nailing a bird in midair.
Hawks do that, just as sharks gobble up fish, and wolves go after deer and elk and, sometimes, sheep and cattle. Wolves, hawks, and sharks are high-end predators. Humans admire them, in a grudging sort of way, because we, too, occupy that niche in the ecosystem. But we do not coexist peacefully.
Coppinger, 61, a professor of biology at Hampshire College, in Amherst, has made an intensive study of predation. He has staked out cow herds in the marshes of northern Minnesota and traveled the mountainous backbone of Italy with shepherds. He has examined predator deterrents used in a dozen countries. He knows what gives a predator pause.
''Every predator tries to avoid hazards at all costs,'' he says. Even a successful scrape can leave a predator bloodied. And because there are no veterinarians in the wild, a weakened predator becomes vulnerable.
A onetime breeder of sled dogs, Coppinger has since 1976 been working to introduce into this country a special type of dog that makes sheep and cattle herds hazardous to the health of predators. This is important because wolves are being reintroduced by wildlife specialists in the Rocky Mountains and are also migrating into central Idaho and Montana from Canada. Wildlife specialists want to reintroduce wolves to the Adirondacks as well.
That's a problem for farmers and ranchers, who vitually exterminated wolves earlier in the century with traps and poisons and are still campaigning against their smaller kin, coyotes.
Coppinger calls his dogs ''sheep-guarding dogs.'' They are not to be confused with Old English sheepdogs, which are just big, friendly animals with cute haircuts. Nor are they like border collies, which do not guard their charges but simply keep them organized by worrying them with little nips. Almost all dogs, in fact, are only a fleeting thought away from reverting to Canis form and at tacking sheep and cattle. But sheep-guarding dogs are different. For centuries, they have been used in the Mediterranean basin, Turkey, the Balkans and eastern Europe - the Italian maremma, the Yugoslavian sar plainetz, the Anatolian shepherd, the Hungarian komondor, and the Russian ovcharka. These are special dogs, says Coppinger. Unlike other Canis familiaris, they will fight for the life of sheep, because they are carefully raised with sheep and believe that they are in the same family.
Two years ago, I saw one of Coppinger's sheep-guarding dogs in action. It was a nice summer day, and my wife and I had driven out to Hampshire College. We had our young Scottish terrier, Hoover, with us. While I was talking with the Hampshire College officials, Hoover wandered under a fence wire and ended up in a sheep pen, where one of Coppinger's dogs was on station. Hoover is not a threatening dog, but Coppinger's sheep guard does not play around, even with a very around, even with a very distant and not terribly serious cousin of the wolf. In a matter of seconds, Hoover was bloody and on his back, begging for mercy.
He survived, there are no hard feelings, and I do not think Hoover is interested in sheep any longer.
Coppinger and his wife, Lorna, have bred 1,400 sheep-guarding dogs. The program has now been fully established with farmers and ranchers around the country, so much so that Coppinger is now out of the breeding business. In Idaho and Nevada, for instance, 90 percent of sheep ranchers use sheep-guarding dogs; few resort to cyanide guns and traps anymore, because the predators keep their distance.
Because he has spent so much time with dogs, Coppinger has opinons about them, just as he does about predators. For one thing, he is not big on the dogs-are-people, dogs-know-love way of thinking that is prevalent in bookstores these days. He does not keep a house dog and would never dream of letting a dog sit on his lap. He loathes the Westminster Dog Show. He believes dogs should work for a living. (Are you listening, Hoover?)
''Look,'' he says, shaking his head, ''nobody can teach a dog to go where you point. Chimps can do it; dogs can't. Dogs have no object permanence, which means they can't remember where you hid a ball. They can't make mental maps of a region, so they get lost easily. They can't find their way home from five houses away.''
His view of dogs is best expressed by a Texas rancher who had one of his sheep guards. By every measure, the dog, named Miss Clairol, was a star. But on annual surveys, the rancher would never put her in the ''superlative'' column. He always marked her as ''good.'' Puzzled, Coppinger called to ask where the dog fell short.
''Well, I don't know what 'superlative' means,'' the rancher drawled. ''Miss Clairol is just a good dog.''
Which is good enough.
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