ROMAINIA:The huge white dogs are used to fend off wolves, bears and lynx, and they erupt when a stranger approaches the shepherds' camp high in the Transylvanian mountains. The men call them off with shouts and whistles and return to milking their flock, but all remain alert for one dreaded visitor - the government inspector who could end their ancient way of life at a stroke.
The Transylvanian shepherds live and make cheese, milk and butter in the same way as their distant ancestors, but since Romania joined the EU in January, time appears to be running out for these long-held traditions.
Brussels wants to stop the shepherds selling their dairy products unless they start using modern sterilisation, cooling and transportation equipment - an impossibility for poor men who eke out a living in a wild and beautiful place where running water means a mountain stream and electricity only flows in the lightning that crackles over their pastures.
"I've been doing this 43 years and it hasn't changed a bit," says Aurel Cotinghi in the pungent little cabin where he makes cheese, as his two sons continue milking outside.
"Now I suppose things will change, but no one has explained it properly to us. Sometime, someone will have to tell us what to do or they will just close us down." Shepherds and farming groups say the Romanian government has done nothing to prepare them for the shock of joining the EU, or to help them avert the threat of a ban on vital sales of dairy products in their own country or in lucrative foreign markets.
The result is that smallholders are already selling their flocks or entrusting them to other shepherds and leaving Romania to seek work in western Europe.
"Lots of young people go to Italy and Spain, and 14 shepherds in this area have just left to pick cucumbers in Germany," says Eugen Gontea, head of the local dairy farmers' association.
"Measures adopted by our officials have completely paralysed the shepherds - they are scared and panicking." Many Romanian farmers fear the government wants to wipe out smallholders and create a series of "super-farms" that meet EU norms; and they suspect that Brussels would like to eradicate the small-scale dairy producer to open the Romanian market to imports.
A deadline for farmers to comply with EU food safety standards by the start of this month has been postponed until the end of December. But that will make little difference unless Romania launches a massive education and investment drive.
"We need investment to overcome our natural hardships: no access roads or infrastructure, no electricity, rugged terrain where transport can only be by donkey and horse, shepherds taking sheep 60 miles to pasture," says Gontea.
"And wolves and bears take the sheep and attack shepherds - four were attacked and one died last year," he recalls. "Few young men want this work and girls won't marry those that do - who'd be mad enough to go into the mountains in these circumstances?" The shepherds' lives are shaped by landscape, the elements, tradition and superstition, and follow a cycle that their remote forebears would easily recognise.
They gather sheep and cows in late April or early May from village smallholdings and backyard pens, and lead them up through forest to lush pastures beneath the mountain peaks.
There they build a wooden stockade for the sheep and use their milk to make several types of cheese. Then they wrap the salty cheese in softened pine bark to make packages for the livestock owners and the village markets, where the shepherds arrive on carts drawn by horses and donkeys that wear a red pom-pom on their heads to ward off the "evil eye".
"If we lose the sheep from the mountains, we have lost the mountains; the whole eco-system will be destroyed and the wild animals will come to villages looking for food," says Gontea.
As he enters their hut after milking the sheep, Cotinghi's 19-year-old son Bogdan admits he is already looking forward to his last day on the job. "Perhaps I'll be a carpenter," he says, as his dad prepares their usual lunch of bread, fresh cheese and spring onions. "There's no way I'm doing this for the rest of my life."