Goat with goat cheese?
Just a plug for the cougar…it was doing what cougars do. We had one two weeks ago take a mule deer in our back yard, it left it in the corner of the yard covered in pine duff. I took it down to the highway station where they have a dump in the back.
The next night the dog went bananas at about 4am. No guesses as to what was lurking in the shadows.
LGB’s are your best idea, or get a few Gander’s I hear cougars hate ganders…
Another guarding animal option is a donkey or llama. Lots of BLM donkeys need guarding positions, and they are best if you don’t have a lot of stock or a smaller space (LGDs like to roam and are not always neighbor-friendly). Sorry about your goat, I had a Nubian cross named Shelley that was awesome. I gave her to a family with two small boys and they just loved her for several years before someone’s Rottweilers found her pen, jumped the fence even 
and killed her. This is why I have all these old sheep that I can’t really use anymore – everytime I sell an older animal, it ends up being dog attacked. So I just end up being a retirement home for sheep LOL. I have good fences (and no cougars, thank God).
I appreciate the thought LVBoPeep, but most of the horse/livestock folks I’ve talked to the last couple of days consider donkeys and llamas to be cougar food. I’ve got a line on a couple of Anatolian Shepard pups, and am also looking into the Pyrenees. I need a giant breed of dog that can scare off a large cat. Or preferably tear it to pieces.
How about the Komondor? A giant breed of guardian dog with dreadlocks.
No problem, although they’ve worked well for several of my horse/shepherd pals :). I’ve seen a donkey full on attack a large dog and although they look sweet and fuzzy, they are actually very aggressive towards predators. But dogs are cool too.
Ideally, you don’t want the cougar to wish to be any where near your place. It would be nice if the dog could simply eliminate the threat entirely but the ideal scenario is that it just decides it’s not worth the risk and withdraws itself from the area. Killing a cougar would still mean possible injury or death to the dog.
And it would mean the death of the cougar, who is just trying to live in its own territory.
I talked to my friend with goats and he said Anatolians can be people aggressive and you might want to look for one mixed with something else, like a Pyrenees. He recommends the Akbash as a good guardian and people dog. He also said there are some lights you can buy to put around the perimeter of your pens facing out at intervals at cougar height. They look like eyes in the darkness and freak out the predators because they think they are being watched.