Flopsie is a Maremma sheepdog. She is about two and a half years old - I got her when she was eight weeks old. She was such a cute fluffy little puppy!!
She started life as an indoor dog, as we didn't have an area outside set up for puppies....
When Flopsie was almost eight months old, in September 2022, we moved out of our house and into a little cabin on the church property. Because there were no proper fences and it wasn't our own land, we had to keep both Flopsie and our other eight-and-a-half year old Labrador Misty tied up all the time, so they had very confined space. I often took them for walks and played with them. They did eventually start to fight though, so we had to keep them tied separately.
When we moved to our current place, I took Flopsie with me, and she loved it here! There was so much space that she could run, and she also loves to run with the quad bike. She can run at up to 40kph for short distances!!!
When we built a fenced area for the ducks, I decided to move Flopsie in with the ducks. Maremmas are a guardian breed, and are often put with sheep or fowl as protection, so I knew she would do well with our ducks. However, usually Maremmas are put with their charges from eight weeks old so they can grow up with them, but even though Flopsie didn't spend much time with the ducks for the first year of her life, she has done very well in learning how to take very good care of them - mostly just instinct, I think, rather than training.
Flopsie is a very good guardian dog. I don't think she barks for no reason most of the time, although sometimes it's very hard to figure out just what the threat is. She does bark at the hawks and eagles when they fly overhead (an eagle could easily swoop down and take off with an unwary duck), and warns us about snakes and lizards too. At night sometimes she'll bark, and the next morning we'll go outside to find dingo, fox, or feral cat paw prints on the driveway, so we know we have them in the area too. She is a good mouser, and even once cornered a bandicoot that was in the duckyard!
One night we had a very large carpet python get into the duck pen and chase a mama duck off her nest, then proceed to eat 9 of the 12 eggs in her nest. The ducks were scared stiff, and Flopsie just kept on barking, although it wasn't until about midnight that we figured out what she was barking about. We got the snake removed, and it hasn't bothered the ducks since, although we have had a few tree snakes, a brown snake and a taipan in the duckyard drinking water from the pond.
We also have had several large lizards and goannas in the area, although they haven't threatened the ducks yet. Flopsie has fun with them though - she'll chase the lizard up a tree, then stand there barking at it, sort of furiously and sort of disappointed that it ran away so fast!!
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