Texas Hill Country
Protection Dogs

In a city, the questions about owning a protection dog are about people: the neighbours, the delivery drivers, the children who visit. In the Hill Country a good share of them are about animals, and many of those animals belong to somebody else. A Belgian Malinois, Dutch Shepherd or German Shepherd is chosen for drive — the urge to chase, grip and keep going — and here that drive lives a fence-line away from goats, sheep, exotic deer, and more white-tailed deer per acre than any other region of Texas. Texas law has a short, blunt answer for a dog that acts on it, and we set it out below in plain words.

None of that is an argument against a protection dog in Gillespie or Kendall County. It is an argument for choosing the dog, the fence and the recall with the neighbours in mind, and for having that conversation before the dog arrives rather than after a phone call from the ranch next door.

Our two programmes are laid out on the protection dog programs page, and published market prices, each tied to whoever published them, are on the pricing page.

Start with the stock, because in the western Hill Country counties it is what separates them from the Metroplex on paper. In the USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, Gillespie County — Fredericksburg — counted 16,305 goats and 18,453 sheep and lambs against 31,872 cattle. Kendall County, around Boerne, counted more goats than cattle, 14,212 to 13,015, and so did Kerr County, 8,800 to 7,949. For comparison, Collin County north of Dallas, which still has 197,374 acres in farms, counted 34,815 cattle against 4,523 goats and 2,871 sheep and lambs: roughly one head of small stock for every five cattle. In Gillespie, Kendall and Kerr the small stock matches or outnumbers the cattle. The eastern counties are mixed, and on goats alone Hays County, 4,628, is about level with Collin; Burnet County counted 24,265 cattle to 8,209 goats. So the argument below is strongest from Fredericksburg, Boerne and Kerrville westward.

Why the mix matters is our view, not a study. We think a goat or a sheep that runs from a strange dog, and a flock that bunches and moves, is close to the exact picture a chase-bred working dog was selected to follow, and harder for it to ignore than a cow that stands its ground.

Then the deer. Texas Parks and Wildlife’s 2025–26 season forecast gives the Edwards Plateau the highest deer population in the state, an estimated 1,628,717, and says it still holds the highest density of deer in Texas: its six deer management units range from 26 to 185 deer per 1,000 acres, with the area around Llano and Mason counties highest of all. The Cross Timbers region, by the same forecast, runs 15.9 to 96.7. And not every hoofed animal here is native. TPWD’s Kerr Wildlife Management Area research page states that axis, fallow, sika and aoudad “are now found in major portions of Kerr, Bandera, Edwards and Real counties.”

The section a Hill Country dog owner should read once is Texas Health and Safety Code § 822.013. It is short, it has been law in some form since 1989, and it does not care whether the dog in question is a stray or a professionally trained animal worth more than the flock it went after.

One definition widens it in exactly the place this page is about. For this part of the code, § 822.011 says livestock includes exotic livestock as defined in the Agriculture Code: plant-eating hoofed mammals “not indigenous to this state”, including the deer and antelope families. Read plainly, the axis or blackbuck behind a neighbour’s high fence is livestock for the purposes of the statute above. A native white-tailed deer is not exotic livestock under that definition; a dog running whitetails raises questions of its own that we are not qualified to answer.

Why this weighs more for a protection dog than for a pet: the dog was selected for the drive to engage and trained to grip and hold. On a person, that is governed by different law, which our guide to Texas dog bite law walks through, and by your policy, which is the subject of our homeowners insurance guide. On a goat, it is this statute, and there is no hearing first. The plain-English version above is ours, and since neither of us practises law, treat it as a reason to read the statute rather than as advice about it.

Our guide to protection dogs on ranches and acreage covers a dog living with your own stock, and why that dog is not a livestock guardian. This is the other half: stock you do not own, cannot proof the dog around, and only see over the wire. Our view is that training holds best while someone is there to enforce it, so everything below is about the hours nobody is.

The Lower Colorado River Authority describes the Hill Country watershed as “Flash Flood Alley”, with one of the greatest risks for flash floods in the United States because of steep terrain, shallow soil and unusually high rainfall rates. In Kerr County that description stopped being abstract on 4 July 2025. The USGS reported flash flood emergencies in parts of Kerr and Kendall counties and rainfall totals of 9 to more than 14 inches, and NPR’s analysis of gauge data found one Guadalupe River gauge near Kerrville rose more than 25 feet in two hours. In the weeks that followed, the Texas A&M Veterinary Emergency Team spent 23 days caring for nearly a hundred search and rescue dogs working the river, first from Tivy High School in Kerrville and then from Comfort. In July 2026 the same team deployed again for flooding in the Hill Country and communities west of San Antonio.

We mention it for one practical reason. Our Houston page plans for hurricane season, where there are days of warning and the hard part is the week after. A flash flood can give minutes. Whether a large, bite-trained dog comes with you is decided by what you set up long before, because there is no time to teach it then. The National Weather Service puts the scale plainly: six inches of fast-moving water can knock over an adult, and a foot of it carries away most cars. A dog on a lead that decides to wade is pulling you toward that, so it does not go near the water at all.

Seven towns across six counties, and not one kind of countryside. The farm figures in each card are for the county around the town, from the USDA farm census cited above.

The towns themselves are another matter. The US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2024 five-year estimates) counts 487 of Horseshoe Bay’s 2,035 owner-occupied homes at a million dollars or more, and about 1,476 across all seven towns, with about 4,369 households at $200,000 or more. Those are survey estimates with wide margins for towns this small, they stop at the city limits and miss the acreage around them, and they say nothing about who has bought a dog from us.

Plainly: nothing of ours is based out here. No kennel, no trainer, no dogs boarded locally. We have published no placement records for this region or any other, so nothing on this page describes a dog already living on a Hill Country place. It is two owners, a North Texas base and a long drive. Our own route estimates from central Dallas, rounded, and before I-35 has its say:

That is a full day’s drive each way, which changes the logistics and nothing about the job. We bring the dog to you and work it in your house and on your ground, with the household there — and out here “your ground” means the fence line, the gates and the creek crossing as well as the kitchen. A handover at a fuel station halfway would skip the exact part of this page that matters.

There are two ways in. The fully trained dog arrives finished, and if goats are on your boundary, ask any seller how the dog has been tested around stock, and ask to see it. With Build Your Own Pup you raise the dog from a puppy, which means it can grow up around the deer, the neighbours and the routines it will live with. Whichever you are leaning towards, the first conversation runs the way we describe in what happens on the first call, and sometimes it ends with us saying you should not buy a dog at all. Our page on a trained protection dog for sale covers what the purchase includes.