09/19/2026
Not sure why they’re continuing to donate one dog. Need 3-4 minimum to deal with a pack of wolves. Seems cruel if the rancher/farmer has no other LGD.
In February 2000, wolves in Montana's Tom Miner Basin killed a 125-pound Great Pyrenees guard dog that had been donated to local ranchers specifically to protect their sheep from wolves.
Ed Bangs, the wolf recovery team leader for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, examined the carcass and found the dog had been crushed over most of its body. It was the same family's second guard dog lost to wolves in a series of incidents, and it happened without a single sheep being touched.
Wolves killed at least 83 dogs in the Northern Rockies between 1987 and December 2005, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's own compiled records, alongside 528 cattle, 1,318 sheep, 12 goats, 9 llamas, and 6 horses confirmed killed over the same period. The dog number is small compared to the sheep and cattle totals, but the pattern behind it is different. Livestock deaths are almost always predation.
Dog deaths from wolves are frequently something else entirely: a territorial fight between two canids that treat each other as rivals rather than as predator and prey.
Bangs explained the mechanism directly after the Tom Miner Basin killing. Wolves see a fight with another canine, especially a large one, as a battle to the death, he said. They're giving it all they've got until they win. A coyote or a stray dog wandering into wolf territory triggers the same response a wolf pack would show toward an unfamiliar wolf: aggressive, often lethal, territorial defense.
A domestic dog does not read as prey to a wolf the way a sheep does. It reads as a competitor, and wolves resolve competition with other canids through violence more readily than they hunt an animal that cannot fight back.
The physical mechanism of the kill reflects that difference. Wolves often use their powerful jaws to crush the chest of dogs or other wolves, breaking ribs and driving the bones into the heart, Bangs said. A wolf killing a sheep for food typically goes for the throat or the flank in an efficient predatory strike. A wolf killing a rival canid crushes and grapples the way it would fight another wolf, because that is functionally what the encounter is.
The wolves responsible for the Tom Miner Basin dog belonged to the Chief Joseph pack. It was not their first conflict with the ranching family. Two members of the pack had already been shot after attacking the family's sheep the previous fall.
Bangs said that if the pack killed another dog, the wolves might be captured and relocated to northwest Montana. For the time being, the agency continued monitoring the pack, four of whose members carried radio collars, while the ranchers received a replacement dog from Defenders of Wildlife, which had donated the original guard dogs and continued supplying breeding stock from a kennel in Billings.
Great Pyrenees dogs have guarded sheep against wolves and other predators for centuries across Europe and Asia, bred specifically for the size and temperament needed to physically confront a predator rather than simply alert to one. In the Northern Rockies, that same size and temperament made them frequent targets when the predator confronting them was a wolf pack rather than a lone coyote.
A 125-pound dog is large enough to fight. It is not large enough, alone, to win against four or five wolves that have decided the fight is territorial rather than optional.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Bangs et al., Carnivore Damage Prevention News, Issue 8 / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Wolf Depredation Records, 1987-2005 / Ed Bangs, USFWS / Bozeman Daily Chronicle, February 2000 / Hank Fischer, Defenders of Wildlife.
