This article from France focuses on cattle, but includes sheep and goats:
bovine in the Massif Central, northern Alps and Pyrénées, ovine in the southern Alps, Provence, Pyrénées and Cevenne, goats in Corse and horses in the Pyrénées.
There are nearly 2 million transhumant cattle. In the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur region, approximately 600,000 cattle spend every summer in the mountain and 100,000 spend the winter in the plains.
How transhumance benefits the environment and biodiversity:
Maintain biodiversity and opened landscapes:
Herds are essential to maintaining open environments. Transhumant breeding is a paragon for environmental protection and natural space improvement: fire fighting contribution, the steppe ecosystem, enhancement of farming fallow land, and maintenance of alpine areas. Since the nineties, breeders have pioneered the various schemes of the Agri-Environmental measures that have continuously succeeded one another.
About the family of Livestock Guardian Dogs...
“To this day flocks are guarded in the hills of Asia, Europe and Africa* by powerful, robust dogs that are neither clumsy nor pacific. Despite the distances that separate them these breeds have much in common, and the Kuvasz is a member of this extended sheepdog family.”
From: Dr. Tibor Buzády, Dogs of Hungary, trans. Bernard Adams, Budapest, Hungary: Nóra Kiadó, 2003, p. 90.
*(and today also in North America, South America and Australia)
