Tess & Beau, now…. and then. ✨

The below photo is from when they were both around two years old, it’s one of my favorites!

We got Beau right after we moved to the ranch as a 1.5 year old livestock guard dog trained by a 4H girl for her project that year. We picked him up at a rest stop halfway between us and he’d never been in a car before!

We got him thinking he’d stay out with the chickens and protect my flock (we had a lot more chickens then) but he pretty immediately bonded to the girls, especially Tess.

We couldn’t keep him contained in the pastures and he ended up patrolling the house each night where the girls slept. We figured that wasn’t a bad result. ☺️

He’s a giant teddy bear to these girls, but if a stranger approaches them or comes around at night… watch out!

And he doesn’t seem to mind Bitsy being otherwise occupied with the puppies right now. They have both always kinda done their own thing (Beau and our other male, Buck, who died last year, were more connected in their roaming and guarding.

Beau is a great family dog – he patrols the ranch all day, often wandering miles into the mountains, and comes home to eat and sleep the day away.

Some days we joke he looks like a tired teenage boy, sleeping all day!

We had trackers on the LDGs for awhile and it was amazing to see where they’d roam.

When Beau got fixed, we had to make extenders on the XL cone, he was too big for it!

He and Dixie are good friends too – we all love Beau around here.

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