The moral of the story is .... Pups will be pups. The biggest problem I have seen with LGDs "to be" is that pups get thrown into flocks and are expected to act as mature, experienced LGDs. The little experience and the much I have read in this subject is that LGDs don't just happen. You can see the instincts there, but LGDs really "grow" into their role as guardians. In my own experience I instantly saw those instincts in the very fact that a pup LGD will not outright try to chase and kill a chicken (my dogs are chicken dogs in training), instead they wagged their tails and would make that "vow" to try and entice "CHICKENS" to play with them. Therein lies the problem and also the very thing that will make the perfect guardian out of the pup. The problem is that "chickens" (and I'd guess goats and sheep) don't like to play with dogs, and what's worse is that "play" for a dog can mean death to a chicken. My female has dispatched two small pullets by literally licking them to death (talk about too much love) They didn't have a single a puncture wound, no blood and were not eaten. They were however soaked in slobber. While the play is not good for livestock and can become a nasty habit if not corrected, it also signals a "bond" to the livestock. It tells you that the pup does not see them as "prey", but rather as littermates. And as the pup he/she is, she tries to play/interact with them like he/she would another pup, and that means trying to wrestle lambs into the ground. Grabbing an ear or going for the legs in a mock fight are just run of the mill. The good news is that play is mostly a pup/adolescent behavior and as the dog matures, he/she will outgrow it. And because the dog sees the livestock as its littermates, it will WANT to be with them and follow the flock as a wolf would follow its pack. Of course no good guardian dog would ever let harm pass to members of its pack and so if anything will come to threaten the pack the dog will come out in its defense and voila, you have an LGD. It takes time for that playful pup to grow into an LGD just like it takes time for a boy/girl to grow into man/woman, but as someone else put it in a previous post, you're better off with a pup wrestling and slobbering your livestock than with a stray dog or coyote that really wants to kill it. Good luck.
