The main sheep-related activity (besides moving sheep) has been “dagging” sheep.
This basically means shearing their butts.
Because Sheep are not cats, who clean themselves, nor dogs, whose owners give them regular baths, and Sheep also have great wooly coats that grow right around where they’re pooping, so their behinds accumulate giant balls of poop that bang along behind them. We call the giant balls of poop “Dag.” You also have to get the dag off before you shear them. I’ll get to that when I post about shearing, later.
The dagging process starts early in the morning with the procurement of the sheep. Sometimes the sheep are quite close to the house, but sometimes they have been living in a paddock further away. Ron and Gay have one long track that goes through their entire property that we can herd the sheep down the middle, but we can also herd the sheep from one paddock into another through a series of gates, accumulating the sheep from each paddock as we go. Ron and Gay are great strategizes in this regard, and I don’t pretend to know what they have planned or how things are going to go until they go that way.
But as I say, one has to be a great strategizer because if you have a mob of sheep—maybe two hundred sheep—thundering (or sometimes meandering) down the road, and a gate’s been left closed, or open, where it shouldn’t be closed or open, you could get them flowing somewhere you don’t want them. Or you could get them stopped, turned around, going the opposite direction. The main thing with sheep, I have learned, is that once they’re doing what you want them to do, KEEP THEM DOING IT. Gay is not often very poetic, but she has referred to sheep like water. If you can get them all flowing in one direction then they’ll keep flowing in that direction. Because Sheep love open gates. If there is an open gate they will go through it. All you have to do is open a gate and they will head for it like the Pope or Walmart is on the other side. So before you herd you have to make sure that every gate is closed and/or open exactly the way you want so that they will go the way you want.
Then you get behind them and you make noise.
Generally we herd them not with dogs (although Gay and Ron do have one dog, Kelly—here is a picture of her) but with “bikes.” The “Bikes” are actually four wheelers, which we frequently drive with passengers, and without helmets or my glasses. The first time I drove one (YES. I DROVE ONE. I DROVE ON THE LEFT SIDE OF THE ROAD, EVEN), I thought something was going wrong in my nether regions, and I was quite concerned that I was ill or falling apart or at the very least some sort of deviant. But no, it turns out that the term “crotch rocket” is the correct term. Now that I have driven the four wheeler multiple times it has lost its charm and I am merely slightly queasy every time I disembark.
So we herd the sheep with two bikes, sometimes a couple people walking along beside, and sometimes the dog. The dog, Kelly, is a little overenthusiastic. She gets the job done all right, but she also scares the sheep into pieces while doing it, which is not always the best plan. When you herd sheep, especially ewes with lambs, it’s best to let them meander along, keeping the lambs with their mothers. You’re going to brutally rip them apart from each other later (during the “weaning”) but if you do it too soon everyone will be upset and the herding will go much worse. No one will go through the gate, or if they do they will not go across the road like you want them too. Lambs will leap through fences, etc. So it’s good to keep everyone happy for as long as possible.
The Sheep get herded up the hill and round the back of the shed where there is a paddock without grass for the sheep to wait in. This is very important because it allows the sheep to poop it out while they’re waiting for Ron and Gay and the rest of us to ready ourselves for the dagging and weaning to begin. Sheep poop more when they’ve just been moved. If they poop outside, then they theoretically won’t be pooping inside. That’s a win-win scenario. Also, that means that they’re a little more flexible—not as full—when they’re asked to stick themselves into the narrow run to get towards where Ron will eventually shave off their butts.
So they wait outside in the mud paddock while we make sure all the gates are where we want them. First we’ll wean the lambs from the ewes. The lambs won’t get dagged because generally there’s nothing to shave. Lambs are adorable and don’t have anything cruddy on their butts. Depending on the weight of the lambs, this is our chance to brutally rip them away from their mothers for good. If the lambs weigh around 60 pounds, then we’ll tear them away from their mothers, slap them on the butts and say, “off you go!” sometimes never to return. If they lambs generally weigh less than 60 pounds, we’ll let them reunite in a joyous, but tearful, Disney-channel special, where the little lamb learns something important and his mother probably has a bum leg but the farmer helps her walk again.
(In reality, a bum leg generally means that the sheep has a parasite. The farmer will inject the sheep with an antibiotic, but if that doesn’t work the farmer will slit the sheep’s throat and then bury it. It might just be something with the bone, but you can’t take any chances. If the bum leg is a result of an incident like trying to leap over a fence and snapping her leg in the process, the farmer instantly slices her throat, and then has no qualms about skinning her and eating her for dinner.)
So anyway! Back to the here and now. The mud paddock is separated from the shed by a giant sliding metal door. We open that, walk along the edge of the paddock, the sheep see an open door and head towards it like a Black Friday sale (theoretically, at least, sometimes they are non-commercial sheep, at which time you have to tempt them by saying “look, just beyond that door is an art gallery!” Then they go running).
They run into the main floor of the shed, and then they flow into the Weaning run, which starts off wide but soon narrows to just about the width of my hips. Then when the sheep comes to the end of the run they are forced into one paddock or another because of a drafting gate which I will now explain.
Imagine a square, with the corners being 1, 2, 3 and 4. The lengths of this square are open, but each corner is fixed. The sheep are coming towards the farmer (who is outside the run) from one direction, through the weaning run, we’ll call those corners 1 and 2. The other corners, 3 and 4, have two swinging gates attached to those corners.
The sheep can go through the openings into a variety of different paddocks. We want those paddock choices so that Long Wooly sheep can go into one paddock, shorn sheep can go into a second, and the lambs can go into a third.
Ron (the farmer) takes the drafting gates (attached to corner 3 and 4) and swings them so that the sheep or lamb is forced to go into one paddock or another. If he has both drafting gates straight, then he makes the lengths from 1 to 3 and 2 to 4 suddenly closed off, and the sheep has to go straight into the paddock beyond. If he has one gate swung diagonal, then the sheep has to go sideways through to a side paddock, etc.
Thus, the lambs are torn from their mothers and there is much bleating. The ewes bellow, the lambs bleat, everyone is very unhappy.
The lambs generally go into a special paddock that has access to the yard beyond the shed, so they’re let outside fairly quickly to romp and play and eat and drink and lay about and search for their mothers and try and get under or through whatever fences they can.
Once the lambs are out of our hair (phew!) then we bring the mothers back to the main floor of the shed. Ron goes and gets ready to dag, I get the various gates ready, and bring a couple sheep up the special run that we have set up for dagging.
It is proven (so says Ron) that animals run better, follow better, around corners. Along a straight road when one animal stops, they all stop. Or like, with a duck, one duck will try to defend a whole stretch of straight water, but that same duck will only defend a small bit of curved water, so if you’re trying to get many mating pairs, you’ll want a curved set up.
So Ron’s set up the fences so that the sheep on the main floor can sort of see the smaller pen where I line sheep up, but there’s a large fence they have to go around. Going around the large fence tempts others to follow, which makes more follow. Once they’re in the smaller pen, I can see that they need to curve along the wall, along a fairly narrow track up to where Ron’s shaving their butts, but actually from their perspective they can’t see anything other than their compatriots are disappearing around a corner.
I put them in the smaller pen because if I didn’t it would be impossible to keep them in the narrow run. As it is they back out frequently, attempt to turn around, get frightened, etc. With a small pen they don’t have as far to go, and often just go right back into the run, trying to follow. If they were left to go back to the main floor, I’d never be able to queue any sheep up at all.
Mostly the sheep seem to want to go into the small pen, especially if you’re lucky enough to get a couple leaders into the small pen when you usher the first lot in. If you get a leader in the first couple times, the rest of the mob will go through easy peasy pie. If the leader of the mob hangs to the back, then the rest of the mob will hang to the back too, and won’t go into the small pen, or will attempt to go back into the weaning run, or will just follow you round and round in circles.
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| You can see the metal gates that allow the sheep to go forwards, but nor backwards. The mirror lets us see if there's a gap in the line. |
Once they’re in the run you have to get them through the run. Often they’ll just follow the sheep in front of them, but there are metal gates inside the run that allow a sheep to go forwards but not backwards. But they stick straight out and the sheep doesn’t know that they’ll give way under the right kind of pressure, and they look kind of scary, so often it’s hard to get the sheep to go past them.
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| This is the end result: the dagging. See: sheep butt. This one is clean. Note that the sheep is being clamped on either side. |
When Simon’s here he stays on one side of the smaller pen and helps queue them up and I herd them into the smaller pen. But when Simon’s not here (or, conversely, when I’m not here and Simon’s here—in any case when there’s only one person doing it) I have to herd the sheep into the smaller pen, hop over the fences, help queue, hop back over the fences, and then herd more sheep in.
Because of the way the shed’s set up, there’s no easy way to get back over to the other side unless you hop the fence. This makes it so that the sheep can’t just get back out or in, and so there’s no wasted space.
Side Note: It means I have about a million bruises. Climbing over fences is difficult! I keep banging my legs on various bits of iron or wood. Ron gave me this stuff, Raleigh’s, to heal bruises. He won’t tell me what’s in it (I suspect he doesn’t know), but apparently you can’t get it in stores, you can only get it from mysterious Raleigh dealers, and it’s good for just about anything. Bruises, sunburns, lubricating a worn car part—you know, whatever. I gobbed some on my leg but no dice. Bruises still there. Maybe I wasn’t a true believer.
Sheep sometimes are nice and easy about going into the smaller pen. Sometimes it seems as if they want to go in. If you have a leader in the pen, or if you recently had a leader in the pen, you’ll frequently have sheep popping up behind you, peering into the small pen, almost asking, “when’s my turn?”
I’m anthropomorphizing, I know.
In any case, however they feel about it, Sometimes they stream in nice and easy, but sometimes they freak out at the last second and barrel out again. Then they’ll bump you against anything that’s available. They’ll bump you against yourself, if you’re handy.
Especially once, I was in a rush because there weren’t that many sheep left in the queue and I needed to get back out to the main floor to get more into the small pen. They were being difficult and I was rushing. I was closing the gate and a sheep leapt right at me, head first, and knocked me down, butt to the ground, and then rushed right past me.
Because sheep are leapers. Did I fail to mention that? Yes, sheep are leapers. You think only the wild ones leap from rock to rock, and oh, how charming, their hoofs find just the right purchase on that slippery rock. Mother nature is so ingenious! How incredible is evolution!
But actually that means that domesticated sheep are leapers too.
Lambs leap. They spring! Into action. Ewes leap too, which is a lot scarier. All of them leap onto each others backs at any time, too. So let’s say Doris (I name all the ewes either Doris or Cleo—don’t ask me why, it just happens), so let’s say Doris is not happy. She makes an unprecedented, graceful, arching leap all the way over Cleo’s back, probably to get away from me, the scary human in blue who is calling her an awful name, like Doris. But her friend, Cleo, clues in halfway through, and starts running midway through Doris’s bid for freedom. So Doris lands partway on and partway off of Cleo, and then Cleo is running with Doris’s back legs dangling off her back. Meanwhile, Doris is running her front legs, and Cleo is running all of her legs, and they’re both trying to get into the run but there’s only room for one of them, and Doris falls off, flops around a bit, finally manages to get up and then runs to the other end of the small pen saying, “Curse you, Cleo! I never should have called your 1-800 number that one time! You were totally wrong about everything!”
(Doris did not say that, I said that for Doris. Doris’s name is not, in fact, Doris. I named her that in my head. I’ve been anthropomorphizing again. Apologies. )
((Actually, I take that back. While I do care about animals staying animals, and while I do view Sheep as an animal and not as an extension of humanity or of myself, it is a whole lot of fun to imagine them as Dorises, with little bonnets and yellow flowers, going into town and socializing, gossiping about how much dag Cleo3 has on her butt versus Cleo2. It is so much fun and I do not regret that at all.))
Generally, when things are going well, and I go to get a next bunch of sheep, I stride into the main floor of the shed. Ron’s got his shearing implement going and can’t hear me; if Simon is there he probably can’t hear me either, and if he can hear me he may not necessarily understand me. I feel safe enough to do what I’m about to do.
I spread my arms wide. Wide spread arms tell the sheep you’re in business. It’s a little scary for them to see wide arms but also it gives them a line of sight to follow along, so they know where to go. But it also makes things work to my advantage.
I stare out over the sea of long white faces. They are all pressed together. Sometimes they are more afraid then other times. I puff out my chest.
“All Riiiiiggghhhtt LAAADDDIIIIEEEESSSSS!!!!!” I say, in my MC announcer voice, “HEEERE WE GO, IN THE RING THIS TIME IS DOOOOORRRRIIIIS!!!!! SHE’S A TWO TIME WORLD CHAMPION LEEEEAAAAPEEERRR!!!!!” (That sounds like "leper" but I'm actually saying "leaper." very different).
This usually is enough to get them into the small pen. If it’s not, I make some “Ho Ho Ho Ho!” noises, to get them revved up EVEN MORE. Then I run behind them, close the gate real quick, sometimes shut myself in with them (so as to hop the fence easier) and shout. “TA DA!”
“Maaaa!” says Doris.
“Ah yes, I hear you, I’m glad you liked it,” I say.
Despite the fun of it, it’s easy to get aggravated. It’s easy to see the sheep (hundreds and hundreds of sheep) not as Doris or Cleo but as sheep number who knows what going past you over and over and over again. When they don’t go into the pen the right way it can be very frustrating, or when you just don’t CARE anymore, it can be very frustrating.
The fact that it’s impossible to have any sort of relationship with them—unlike with a cat or a dog or a horse—makes me impressed with Ron and Gay even more. They’ve been sheep farming on this particular farm for thirty years, and Gay grew up on a sheep farm before that. There has to be a certain kind of love they feel for massive numbers of generally unresponsive, in fact, generally fearful animals. There are certain sheep that they raise from a bottle, “pets” they call them, which aren’t as skittish, but those get put into the mobs of regular sheep just the same, some of their names get forgotten just the same. Maybe they’ve installed the peacocks and the pigs and the llamas and the other birds in the aviary to have something to love and care for that has a chance of loving you back, or won’t run from you when you get near to them.
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| Annabel, in the sun |
There are two cats on the farm, Zeb and Annabel. Both are about thirteen years old, both are having eye trouble, and while Zeb is a little more independent than Annabel, both love to be stroked. Annabel will climb into your lap and stick her face into your throat or ear or chin or anywhere, and expect love. I am more than happy to accommodate her. Zeb just lies in whatever hallway you’re going down and expects you to caress his whole body and say things like, “What a fine coat, what a fine animal. What a beautiful, lovely striped cat you are, Mr. Zeb. How fine you are. Who could be more handsome? Who could be more svelt?” Or maybe he doesn’t expect it, but I am more than happy to give him both the stroking and the commentary. Also, both cats have a filmy mucusey gunk that collects up in their eyes. Zeb, I think, has an abscess and won’t let me near his eye, but Annabel—I don’t know what’s wrong with her but I just wipe out the gunk in both her eyes so she can see clearly again. I do this about once a day.
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| Zeb, disregarding the chicken, both of whom are in the sun. |
My conclusion is that caring for sheep is not as rewarding as caring for cats. Also, it’s harder work. I don’t know about emus or llamas. I expect that they, too, are harder work and less rewarding then caring for cats. Cat’s purr at you, and knead you, and talk to you, and when they’re done they GO AWAY. That is very rewarding. Sheep have to be driven away from you. Otherwise, they just sit where you last put them and stare at you and bleat and bleat and bleat. That is not so rewarding at all. It is rewarding, however, and I expect Gay and Ron feel this way, to sell a lamb or a ewe for anywhere from $60-90 dollars, depending on the market (also, ewes and lambs fetch different prices. Ewe’s are worth less than lambs). You cannot sell a cat for that much. I would not want to sell my cat (just the thought of it is making me very upset) Maybe that is the trade off.
Love = must not sell.
Sell = must not love.
And yet, as I say, there is a strength to loving a large mob of unidentified sheep that are scared of you and that you will sell, that you will end up maybe killing—but until that time you will nurture and care for. There is a strength to protecting a large flock of animals that can’t return any feelings towards you. All of your giving and giving and giving will go into the ether, will go unrecognized, will just be taken and accepted and unreturned, and you may have saved a lamb from getting its head bashed in, or its leg cut off; you may have helped an ewe give birth and saved her life, but the next time you see her—if you recognize her—she will still shy away from you, she will still see you as the enemy.
Drenching is the final step to this whole procedure. Sometimes it’s done on the same day, but sometimes not. It’s very taxing, but if the sheep you’re dagging have intestines that are crawling with worms—well, it’s got to be done.
Drenching is when you inject medicine into the sheep’s mouths that will kill the worms in their intestines. The worms grow in their intestines, get pooped out, breed in the ground, get eaten, and then start the whole cycle again. The worms love it, but it’s no good for anyone else. So Gay and Ron have a kit in the mud room downstairs where they test the sheep’s fecal matter for worms with a microscope and everything. If the number of worms is high enough we drench the sheep that have been in that paddock.
It’s not so fancy—we just run a bunch of ewes and lambs into a small run (not the weaning run, a different one), closed off at both ends. Ron climbs into the run with them. He’s got a backpack full of liquid strapped to his back with a hose and a squirt gun in his hand. It looks like a Ghost Busters Pack, but when I asked Ron SO WHO CAN YOU CALL he didn't get the reference.
Ron likes Westerns. Also, he lives in New Zealand.
So he squirts one squirt into the lamb’s mouth and two squirts into the ewe’s mouth. When he’s done with them he opens a side door and lets them run out.
Because there wasn’t going to be any danger of snipping hamstrings, he let me (encouraged me, brow beat me, even) into trying it. I just set my camera down NEXT to the drenching pack and he said, “Oh! I thought you were going to pick up the back pack and try it out there for a minute!” at which point I blinked at him, stuttered, and then felt like I sort of had to.
It is DIFFICULT, because the ewes are about 160-190 pounds, and they’re not happy with, A. being penned up like this, B. having you near them, C. Having their heads tilted back, D. Having a squirt gun full of chalky blue awful tasting liquid shoved onto their tongues. They jump on each other or try to turn around or kick. They spit the drench up, shake it out, or don’t let you get it into their mouths in the first place. You’ve got to hold their heads up while you simultaneously sometimes hold their butts in one place with your legs. And no, the ones we did had not been previously dagged.
So you can imagine the mess.
Also, Ron is tall and can reach all the way along their backs to get to their heads, but I am much shorter and there were times when I looked at a head and knew there was no way I was going to be able to stay standing firm on the back end of the sheep and reach all the way to the front end. Sometimes you can spread your legs and sort of straddle them, but the run is narrow and with both Ron and I and sometimes three sheep abreast in the run, it was not always possible to do that.
The first run full of sheep I didn’t do so well (in fact I sort of made a great big mess), but the second run full I did a much better job. When I mentioned this later Ron said, “Ah, yes. You’ve got potential.”
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| Ron acting like a GhostBuster without even trying! What a natural! He's even got blue sploosh stuff to get Ghosts with! |
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