09/25/2026
This is why it's SO IMPORTANT to put ONLY Livestock Guardian Dog breeds with a herd.
Recently, I've been seeing people selling LGDs mixed with herding breeds or bully breeds. Big NO!
ONLY trust LGD breeds or LGD mixed breeds with your herd.
A livestock owner in southwestern Washington reported that a cougar had killed his llama in March 2025. Local law enforcement brought hounds out to track the cat. They searched and found nothing.
Todd Jacobsen, a wildlife conflict specialist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife who covers Klickitat, Skamania, and Clark counties, drove out to examine the carcass. The llama had been frozen since the kill. Jacobsen thawed it, performed a necropsy, and spent enough time on the scene to reach a conclusion that did not match the report. The wounds were not consistent with a cougar. The bite spacing, the location of the injuries, and the pattern of damage pointed to domestic dogs.
He told the owner. A couple of weeks later, the owner called him back. He had just caught his own three dogs attacking and killing two more llamas in the same enclosure.
Misidentified livestock kills are common enough that universities publish field guides for telling them apart. A cougar kills with a bite to the back of the skull or the top of the neck, drags the carcass to cover, and feeds methodically starting at the chest cavity. The puncture wounds are spaced to match a cat's short, wide jaw. Dogs do something different. They chase. They bite the legs, the flanks, the ears, the hindquarters. They inflict extensive surface damage across the body without the concentrated killing bite that a cat delivers. They often do not feed at all. Multiple animals may be injured or killed in the same attack because the dogs keep going after the first one is down.
A confirmed cougar kill can trigger a depredation permit, a hunt with hounds, and lethal removal of the cat. A confirmed dog kill is a conversation between the owner and animal control. In this case, law enforcement had already run hounds through the property looking for a cougar that was not there. If Jacobsen had not examined the carcass himself, the cougar would have remained the official cause, and the three dogs sleeping in the owner's house would have kept killing llamas.
A dog's behavior around its owner establishes almost nothing about what it does when left alone with livestock. ATTRA's livestock protection guide specifically documents well-fed family pets among dogs confirmed killing sheep, goats, and calves. The animal that sits on the couch at night and the animal that chases a llama across a paddock at 2 a.m. can be the same dog operating under two completely different sets of instincts, and the owner is usually the last person to suspect it because the version of the dog they know would never do that.
Jacobsen's report in WDFW's biweekly wildlife program summary for March 16 through 31, 2025, runs four sentences. It does not give the dogs' breeds, describe the first llama's specific wounds, or say what happened to the dogs afterward.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: WDFW, Wildlife Program Report, March 16-31, 2025 / Todd Jacobsen, WDFW / ATTRA, Predator Control for Sustainable and Organic Livestock Production / UF/IFAS, Livestock Predation: Identifying the Culprits.
