June 2025
John Jamison kneels with his two patrol dogs, Cinder the Border Collie, left, and Blue, a Catahoula Blue Leopard. (courtesy John Jamison)
DICKERSON, Md. — Animal collars with GPS tracking ability have gained attention in recent years at keeping livestock within a field, but a Montgomery County farmer is using the technology to try to keep out crop-damaging wildlife.
Since late last summer, John Jamison has outfitted his two dogs with GPS collars to patrol fields for geese, groundhogs and deer.
Jamison said he’s tried several other deterrents to keep deer away. “I’ve tried it all and nothing worked except for lead poisoning,” he said, referring to hunting.
In the fall of 2023, Jamison got a Border Collie named Cinder for his son and at the next spring planting season, Cinder was chasing after wildlife between rides in the tractor. After Cinder ran off exploring for a couple days, Jamison looked into tracking collars to keep better tabs on her.
“That was the lightbulb moment,” Jamison said. “What if we could pair GPS fencing with a dog’s natural prey drive to keep them patrolling exactly where we want them?”
Jamison reached out to Luke Macaulay, University of Maryland Extension wildlife management specialist for advice on other breeds that could work at patrolling fields and one that came up was the Catahoula — a heat-tolerant, short-coated, high-drive breed, bred to hunt feral hogs in swamps.
While Cinder was good at seeing and chasing the wildlife pests, Jamison said he needed a dog that the animals would fear.
“I knew I needed something tough,” he said. “Even at night in a soybean field, it’s still blazing hot, and with the threat of coyotes, I needed a dog that could protect my smaller Border Collie and handle himself out there.”
In short order, Jamison found a Catahoula Blue Leopard pup in Tennessee and named him Blue. By the end of last summer, Blue had grown up some and had his own GPS collar and the two dogs worked in tandem on farm border control, Cinder as the scout and Blue as the enforcer.
“They both have complementary traits,” Jamison said. “You have an extremely high energy dog that will bark at anything she sees, and then you’ll have the bull show up that is like, ‘Nah, not today.”
Macaulay said there’s been quite a bit of research done on the effectiveness of dogs patrolling fields for wildlife pests, showing success in pine plantations and apple orchards but study sites were generally about 15-20 acres.
The studies also were done with systems that required buried lines to establish a fence perimeter. With GPS, that expense is gone but Jamison and Macaulay want to see how dogs could do on larger fields. “That’s where I think the real question lies, is can these dogs roam farther, how big an area can the dogs cover and protect crops,” Macaulay said.
For any wildlife control practice, Macaulay said different farmers have different constraints and interests in what they want to try. “Some people just love having dogs, they have dogs around anyway, so I think this is one of those use cases for a certain type of farmer who is interested in that,” Macaulay said.
One practice Jamison and Macaulay hope to test is using the dogs at night to disrupt deer’s nocturnal patterns making them more active in the day in the window of in-season deer management permits.
“It would make it better in the sense of pushing them out of that nocturnal window when we’re not allowed to discharge firearms at deer,” Jamison said, attributing the idea to Macaulay.
They’re also curious if the dogs could be moved to different fields at critical times in the crop’s growth — in the case of soybeans, when plants are under six inches or at flowering — for more targeted protection and wider coverage.
Jamison said it was too far along in the growing season last year for the dogs to impact crop damage from wildlife but that’s something he’ll observe this year as the dogs guard a 77 acre soybean field.
Through the fall and winter, however, he’s seen many positive results.
There’s virtually no sign of groundhogs on the farm, the dogs put continual pressure on geese landing in the field and they have been diligent at pulling deer bones and antler sheds out of the field, likely saving the farm thousands in tire repairs. “So just that makes the collars and dog food well worth it,” he said.
And they do chase deer, too, but without a cash crop in the field yet, he can’t say yet how it would translate into mitigating crop damage. “If they see deer, they’re running after them,” Jamison said. “And those deer are running out of the field.”
This article appeared in The Delmarva Farmer, an agricultural newspaper for the mid-Atlantic region.
