The Barking Anatolian Army
A dog rescues a family plagued by mountain lions and corn as a source of ethanol.
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Anatolian shepherds ""Tess"" and ""Boaz"" on guard duty at the Bryant Farm
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A Turkish dog comes to the rescue of a Colorado family
plagued by mountain lions.
Living with the Colorado Mountain Lion
For many years my family lived just outside Durango,
Colorado, surely one of the most beautiful places in the
United States to set up a household and raise children.
Armed with years of experience tending a cattle farm, we
became a ranching family and gambled on deriving all the
household income from raising beef cattle.
I was on my way to the mailbox one winter morning a few
years after we moved in, when I saw my first set of
mountain lion tracks. I was thrilled, eager to catch sight
of this "rare" and "shy" predator that I'd heard so much
about from the news and public television. How naive I was.
Just a few weeks after seeing those tracks in the snow, I
lost my first head of cattle—its 2,000 lb of bone and
muscle crisscrossed with the claw marks and jagged bite
wounds of the mountain lion.
In the months that followed, we lost thousands of dollars
in exotic livestock and on several occasions came very
close to being attacked ourselves. The lions that hunted
our property showed no fear of humans whatsoever. They
walked up our driveway in broad daylight, attacked our
animals and pets at random, and ignored our shouts, our
sticks, and our dogs as we futiley tried to drive them
away. Late one fall afternoon, a house guest of ours pulled
into our driveway only to have a lion jump onto the car
roof and paw at the windows.
We were not the only family experiencing problems. After
getting a few neighbors together to discuss our cattle
losses, I learned that my family was lucky. Our closest
neighbor, who raises Red Angus cattle, was so plagued by
lion kills that they were compelled to move their yearlings
into an enclosed pen next to their house, and to illuminate
the pen with floodlights all night long. Less than a week
after using the pen, they awakened to find every one of the
animals in the pen killed or badly maimed by lions. Last,
an acquaintance who lived some miles away told of her
husband being attacked as he bent down to open the water
spigot in his field. It was difficult to imagine that this
man posed a threat to, or cornered the lion in any way,
while he was standing in the middle of his field.
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