Amarillo & Lubbock
Protection Dogs

Most of what we write about working dogs in Texas is heat advice, because most of the state needs it. Up here the numbers turn round. In NOAA’s 1991–2020 normals, Amarillo averages 17.2 inches of snow a year and 108 days when the low reaches freezing. Lubbock averages 7.0 inches and 84 such days. At Dallas–Fort Worth, where we are based, it is 1.6 inches and 29 days. A dog moving from North Texas to a house in Amarillo is moving into more than three times as many freezing nights as it has known.

None of that makes the Panhandle a bad place for a Belgian Malinois, a Dutch Shepherd or a German Shepherd. It does mean the handover has to cover things a Dallas handover never touches: where the dog sleeps in January, what happens to training when the ground is ice, and what the family does with a high-drive dog when a storm shuts the roads for two days.

The thermometer undersells it, because the wind rarely stops. Amarillo’s mean wind speed is 12.9 mph across the year against 10.5 at DFW. Take Amarillo’s normal January low of 24.9°F and its average January wind of 12.2 mph and run them through the National Weather Service wind-chill formula, which the Weather Service says describes how cold people and animals feel outside: the answer is about 14°F. Lubbock’s January figures give about 17°F. Dallas–Fort Worth’s give about 28°F. That is our arithmetic, not a published number, and it is rough, because the wind at the hour of the low is not the day’s average. The gap is the point.

Then there are the storms. NOAA’s station narrative for Amarillo says snowfalls of ten inches or more, usually with near-blizzard conditions, come about once every five years and last two to three days. The station’s record for snow in a single day, 19.0 inches, was set in February 2013: across 24 and 25 February the National Weather Service in Amarillo recorded 19.1 inches with gusts to 75 mph, and reported that snowplows and rescue vehicles were stranded with everyone else. Two days like that can mean no vet visit, no field and no long walk.

That is where training shows. A protection dog whose obedience only exists on a field has none during a snowed-in week. The routine that survives is the one that does not need space: a place command held while the family moves around it, short obedience in a hallway, a door that the dog waits at until it is released. Ask any seller, us included, to spend part of the handover on exactly that.

Further south the coat argument runs one way. As our German Shepherd page puts it, a heavier coat is real work in a long hot summer, and the short-coated breeds handle heat better. The Malinois and the working-line Dutch Shepherd are the short-coated pair of the three.

Here it runs both ways at once. Summer has not gone away: Amarillo still averages 72 days a year at or above 90°F and Lubbock 91.5, against 106 at DFW, so in Lubbock the hot season is most of the length of North Texas’s. Then comes the winter above. Our view as trainers, not a study: the heavier coat earns its keep on a January morning outside, and the short-coated dogs manage it with shorter sessions and a warm place to come back to. We think the difference is real and modest, which is why we do not let coat decide the breed in either direction.

The note the Panhandle adds to our Malinois, Dutch Shepherd and German Shepherd comparison is about a snowed-in week, and it is our view as trainers. A young, high-drive Malinois with two days of nothing to do is harder to live with than a Shepherd in the same situation, and a family in Amarillo that expects to be stuck inside a few days each winter should weigh that honestly.

Wind is not only a winter problem. NOAA’s narrative for Lubbock notes that winds over 25 mph occasionally blow for twelve hours or longer, mostly with late-winter and spring low-pressure systems, and that spring winds often bring widespread dust across the South Plains. Amarillo’s narrative adds that humidity occasionally drops below 20 per cent in spring. That combination of wind and very dry air is also fire weather, which is the next section.

What we take from that is our judgement as trainers, not anybody’s data. On a day of hard wind and blowing dust, the dog hears its handler less well and sees less, so keep the work short and close: no long sends, no off-leash work at a distance, and ask whether the dog you are buying also answers hand signals. After a big wind, walk the fence and check the latches, because a protection dog outside its fence without you is outside the conditions its training assumes.

On 26 February 2024 the Smokehouse Creek fire started near Stinnett, in Hutchinson County. By the time it was contained three weeks later, the Texas A&M Forest Service put it at roughly 1,058,482 acres, the largest wildfire in Texas history; it was ignited by power lines. By the next day several fires were burning in the Panhandle, and, the Texas Tribune reported, officials ordered nearly 5,000 residents of Canadian, Fritch and Glazier to evacuate or shelter in place. In Canadian the main road out was blocked by the fire, and gusts of 40 to 50 mph pushed the Smokehouse Creek fire toward Pampa.

A wind-driven grass fire gives you whatever time it takes to cross the pasture between it and you. With a bite-trained dog the question is whether it gets into the truck on the first word while you are frightened and the family is shouting. The general evacuation plan, a crate that fits the vehicle and a caretaker the dog already knows, is on our Houston page and applies here as well. What follows is the part a grass fire adds.

In 2016, when Texas Tech proposed a four-year veterinary college in Amarillo, its case rested on a severe shortage of veterinarians specialising in large animals and serving rural communities, and it stated plainly that many rural counties have no veterinarian at all. The school welcomed its first class on 18 August 2021. Five years on, High Plains Public Radio reports its dean saying more than 90 per cent of graduates start in rural and regional practices. It also reports that many West Texas owners cannot get the care they need because the closest big practices are in other states or Dallas.

Be clear about what those two sources cover: large-animal and rural veterinary coverage, and where new graduates go. Neither says anything about small-animal or after-hours capacity inside Amarillo or Lubbock. What we take from them is our own judgement. If the big referral practices are as far off as that report says, the specialist end of a working dog’s care is a long drive from anywhere up here, so settle before delivery day which practice will take a large bite-trained dog, and in Pampa, Canadian or Fritch check how far that practice is from your door. Every veterinary document comes with a fully trained dog at delivery, so the new vet starts from the record, not from scratch.

The second is about the injuries we worry about most in a working dog: soft-tissue and joint damage from hard landings and sudden turns, which is one more reason we care so much about footing in winter. If specialist orthopaedic care is a long drive away, prevention is cheaper than the drive. That is our view as trainers, not a veterinary statement.

Amarillo itself sits in southern Potter County and extends into Randall County. Interstate 27 was built from there down to Lubbock, the centre of the South Plains, which NOAA’s Lubbock narrative places on the Llano Estacado, the plateau the Cap Rock escarpment bounds. This page is written for both ends of that road and for the Panhandle towns the 2013 storm and the 2024 fires put on the map: Fritch, Pampa, Stinnett and Canadian.

The winter is not spread evenly across them, and the numbers above show it. Amarillo averages well over twice Lubbock’s snowfall, and the February 2013 blizzard that buried Amarillo also dropped 16 inches on Fritch and 15 on Pampa, according to NBC 5’s report from the storm. A family in Amarillo and a family in Lubbock are not buying for the same January, which is one reason we ask where the house is before we talk about dogs.

Two things on this ground belong to other pages. Snakes are a Texas-wide summer hazard, and our guide to rattlesnakes and dogs in Texas covers them. Livestock and acreage are covered in the ranch guide linked above. What belongs here is the cold, the wind and the fire.

We deliver the dog in person, from North Texas; how we travel gets settled on the first call. By our own rough reckoning, not a published figure, Amarillo is around 365 road miles from Dallas and Lubbock around 345. The obedience handover happens in the rooms and yard the dog is going to live in, with the dog handed over standing next to you, which is the point of delivering in person rather than shipping.

Winter changes the calendar. In the 2013 blizzard, as many as 100 motorists were stalled in whiteout on I-27 between Amarillo and Lubbock, and part of I-40 east of Amarillo was still closed the next day. A sensible delivery date up here is one that can move: nobody should be driving a dog into a blizzard warning or running a handover in one, so agree in advance that the date shifts if the forecast turns. A winter handover should also cover the routine above, walked through on your own property. Ask for it.

Distance matters differently for the two programs. With a fully trained dog, most of the work is finished before the drive, and what follows is a family learning to handle a dog that already knows its job. With Build Your Own Pup, the family raises the puppy at home with us involved throughout, and several hundred miles changes how that involvement works. Ask us on the first call exactly how the in-person parts would run from this distance, and decide with that answer in front of you. For the buying side, what buying one involves is on its own page.