I'm currently researching guard animals other than dogs and I feel like there should be more than two, but it's surprisingly hard to find a good search term that gives me results other than dogs or geese.
@eleanorkonik llama are also said to be good and they mix OK with goats and sheep. If there was space elephants may do OK. It's a herd animal behaviour so probably alert behaviour would be similar as with meercats and deer
@eleanorkonik Depending on context, donkeys and llamas (!). Mules, I think.
Also, some guard animals will successfully fight off the expected predator, some just make a lot of noise failing to fight off predators. Roosters are like that in rural places IME -- despite their armament, they rarely survive a battle, so they're a bit of an ablative shield. Keeping a couple of backup roosters requires separate pens.
@eleanorkonik this was a lazy click-the-top-search-result list, but does it help?
https://www.treehugger.com/unusual-guard-animals-4864069
Dolphins was the one I found most intriguing from this list! 🐬
@badri Oh, nice list! I wonder why Google didn't give me it when I searched. Blasted algorithms :(
@eleanorkonik hmm, well I used DuckDuckGo 😉
I also sometimes try my luck with different search engines to see if they get better results for a particular topic. At the very least, if it's a non-Google top result, you have something different from what *most* people are going to!
@eleanorkonik okay, just checked my search history; it might also be to do with the fact that i minused things from my search (if you put a minus in front of a word, it shows results that *don't* have the word).
My search was: guard animals -dogs -geese
@eleanorkonik Llamas sometime are used to guard animals