Don’t let their friendly faces fool you. These seemingly calm and friendly dogs are responsible for protecting hundreds of livestock from wild dog attacks in outback Australia.
After watching countless numbers of her livestock get killed by wild dogs for years on her pastoral property in Yalgoo, WA, Gemma Cripps had enough. It was breaking her heart knowing that she was losing countless animals to something she could not control. She almost gave up sheep running altogether and becoming solely a cattle station.
2020 was the worst year for Cripps. She started the year off with 820 ewes in her care, but by the end only 620 ewes remained. The ewes only produced 17 lambs that year.
Gemma Cripps had seen Maremmas working on a cattle station, so she decided to trial them at her sheep station.
So Ms Cripps decided to give sheep raising one last go. She had seen Maremmas working on a cattle station, so she decided to try them out at her property, Gabyon Station. She ended up buying two adult Maremma dogs and four Maremma puppies.
So did Maremmas work?
She started off by mixing the Maremma sheepdogs with the sheep to get them accustomed to one another. Then the dogs were sent out into the 6,000 hectare paddock at the start of last year. She has since seen a significant improvement in their lamb and ewe survival rate, prompting them to consider expanding their flock.
“We only lost about 5% of our flock, but ended up with a 65% lambing rate,” Ms Cripps said. “I know it’s not the best time to consider buying more sheep at the moment with all the risks we’ve got in agriculture, but my mum [Helen] and I decided that 600 ewes is just not enough to run as a flock.”
Gemma Cripps with her Maremma pups and goats at her sheep station. Credit: Jo Prendergast (ABC Rural).
She’s confident that her Maremmas are good enough to handle a larger flock.
Ms Cripps is currently raising eight more young dogs that were born in March of this year. The dogs are currently bonding with goats of a similar age. The new puppies will slowly be introduced to the sheep to bond before joining Cripps’ nine other adult dogs in the field.
“You have to introduce the puppies to the animals they have to protect at an early age,” Cripps says. “It’s just letting them know that they have to protect them.”
After introducing Maremmas to protect her flock, Cripps has seen a significant improvement on her flock numbers.
Along with the eight puppies, Ms Cripps currently has nine adult Maremmas protecting the sheep. Her reasoning is due to the fact that her paddocks are so big, she wants to have some of the Maremmas walking alongside the paddock’s boundary to deter the dingoes.
She’s unsure whether the Maremmas fight the dingoes or they are simply a deterrent to the predators.
“It doesn’t matter as long as the dingoes are not attacking our sheep.”
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