You know you don’t know sheep when…

As I’ve said before, Mom, Bev, and Cindy are from an island in Lake Erie. Both Bev and Cindy were police officers, and many years ago, Mom owned a fish business on the mainland. Bev had also grown up on family farms with some sheep and harness horses. When they decided to move to Beryl, it was going to life-changing… just how life-changing was yet to be discovered.

Shari moved here from Oregon. She at least had some “agri-business” background, having grown up in the Portland suburbs, and later in western Washington County, where she raised rabbits commercially and also owned a USDA-inspected rabbit processing facility. She joined the party in Utah in late 2006, shortly after the others acquired their first lambs.

Around here, most folks have livestock of some sort. They either have chickens, sheep, goats, cows or horses. Only a few are truly retirees, who may simply own a dog or two. Even they tend to have gardens.

It was a neighbor, Dixie, who brought us our first lamb. Mom named him Taco. A little later, he was joined by Paco and Wooly. As told in other stories, these little guys began their lives in the house and then in the backyard. After they cleared the yard of all the weeds, they were moved to their own pen, and thus began the saga of the Four Country Gals raising sheep.

One day in late fall, they found Taco dead, no real cause ever known, but they remembered later he would often choke on his bottle milk, sending it spraying out his nose. Obviously something wasn’t right with him. The girls hauled him out to the border of the property and gave him up to the coyotes, eagles, and other varmints, as the ground was frozen and they couldn’t bury him.

That left Paco and Wooly. They really had no idea what they were going to do with them, other than get a kick out of their antics. Shortly, a ewe lamb became available (from Dixie). Since the other lambs had all been neutered, the plan was that they would sell the remaining two boys and keep the ewe lamb to breed the next year.

Bev and Cindy were working for a gentleman farmer several miles up the road. He agreed to purchase the lambs and have them custom butchered for his freezer. That took care of that!

Not wanting to leave Chiquita (the first ewe lamb) alone, they also acquired “Merino” a black merino/polypay cross. She was quite a little sweetheart.

Now the winter of 2006 going into 2007 was extremely cold and very snowy. It seems like the temp stayed below freezing for better than two months. We very dutifully cared for our little sheep and the horses. That meant making trips to Enterprise every 2 weeks for baled alfalfa. We loaded the hay onto the Avalanche, and then home to unload it into the barn and sometimes another small trailer for the sheep. No small feat for us in the cold and snow.

In early March, Dixie called and suggested we join her to help with getting her sheep ready for lambing. “Sure, we’ll be there. What should we wear, and what should we bring?”

We were told to dress warmly as we’d be out for several hours, and would possibly get muddy and wet if the pen ground thawed. Gloves and hats were a definite. If we had some coveralls, those would be very handy as would good boots.

I remember that sometime around 9:30 AM, we piled into the Avalanche and drove over to Dixie’s, about a mile by road. We pulled in and were greeted by the dogs and then Dixie. She filled us in on exactly what we’d be doing. We had to move the pregnant sheep (and the younger ewe lambs) to a small pen, leaving the ram by himself.

Now, rams are never to be trusted. They are especially dangerous to women. Seems as though they think of us as ewes, something to be bred, not respected.  So, here we are… all three of us (Bev, Cindy, and myself) out in this 1/4 acre pasture working to move the ewes to a small pen, without having the ram join them.  None of us had ever moved sheep. We had no idea where to stand, how to move, when to put pressure in certain directions.

What a roundup!

We spent several minutes working the sheep into the right formation to get through the gate, only to have them bolt away. All this time, we had to worry about that ram. Finally, Dixie said, “Let’s bring the ram into the pen, and we’ll deal with him from there.”.

Now, that’s comforting. The ram is going to be in the small pen, where we’re cutting out ewes and checking to see if they’re pregnant. Oh, this is going to be fun… watch your backside while watching your hips, knees, and anything else they can hit you with, as they all run by.

The plan was that the three of us would capture a ewe and put it on the ground on it’s back. That way, Dixie could check it for imminent lambing, and trim the excess wool away from it’s teats, a process called “crutching”. Of course, we’d be holding the ewe down… and the ewe wouldn’t be happy.

To capture a ewe, we had lassos (great!… none of us had used those). The pen was almost small enough to walk right into the flock. Dixie tossed some hay for them to eat and showed us how she would sneak up behind one and very quickly grab a hind leg and hang on.

You should have seen us trying to sneak up on a ewe, grab a leg and hang on. First off, two of us are packing enough weight for another person, and really are pretty slow. Finally, what seemed work as a form of “dogging”.

Bev and I would sort of corner a ewe, and then flush her down a fence line, where Cindy would throw herself onto the ewe, tackling it and taking it to the ground by rolling it over onto herself. Not a pretty site, but relatively effective.

We’d get to laughing so hard, it was really difficult to keep cornering ewes. Remember, that darn ram was in that pen, too. The ewe’s would circle around him, protecting hm. That was fine as long as there were still 7 or 8 ewes. Once we depleted that stock, we were really in danger.

Time out to get the ram moved back to his pasture. We’d been processing the ewes and then coercing them into a pen to the right. Any ewe lamb that wasn’t pregnant was returned to the pasture on the left side, where the ram would be going. Did you know sheep could leap nearly 3 feet off the ground while running full speed? Neither did we. Time out to hold our sides laughing again.

Some of the ewes were so tired and traumatized that we had to nearly carry/drag them to their new home. What they didn’t know was that we were in nearly the same condition. It was a race to see who would give up first.

Surprise, once the ewe round up was over, we turned our attention to lambs which had been born in the last week. Dixie figured this would be good training for us, so off to the lambing area, where she presented Bev with a little lamb.

Instructions were to turn the lambs belly towards her, and raise the little guy up so she could inspect his little balls (scrotum). She had this device that looked really wicked. She slipped a fat little rubber band onto the end prongs and grabbed the little guy’s balls, gently releasing the band. Ouch!

Then Bev had to reposition the little guy and do the same with his tail. By now, this little fellow was not a happy camper. All he wanted was down… but no, Dixie still had to give him a shot of vaccine, called CD/T. That’s supposed to help with “overeating disease”, scours, and tetanus.

I guess we probably went through a half-dozen lambs before Dixie said we’re done.

Remember I said we turned the ewe lambs aka “springers” back into the same pasture with the ram? The reason was that the Polypay breed is supposed to breed twice a year. That said, Dixie recommended we bring both Chiquita and Merino over to be bred by her ram.

Deal!

The only trick was how to get the girls from our place to hers. Let’s just walk them across the desert. No matter there’s 6 or so inches of snow on the ground. I know enough math to know that the long side of the triangle is generally shorter than the two sides, if those two sides are nearly equal. Ok, but how we gonna do this?

Easy, we put a dog (choke) collar and lead on Chiquita and led her. Merino just kind of romped along with us. I couldn’t believe my eyes… and neither could Dixie.