[Jacob-list] Wild sheep

[Grose]

I suppose that I should have said that my Jacob sheep are not aggressive, they just want to be left the heck alone. Once confined,they are rather calm. Several of the older ewes will actually show their affection for me by walking calmly up to me and nuzzling my leg briskly with their horns.

My experience with showing Jacobs is fairly limited. The young ones are so small that I seldom can keep a halter on them, opting instead to carry them to their place in line. This has the additional advantage of preventing them from escaping and doing laps in the ring.[Glen Eidman once asks me why I had failed to dock a lambs tail. His mood brightened considerably when I explained that " this was the first chance I had to catch her."] Oddly, The 2year old ram broke to lead the most easily of any animal that I have worked with. This may be due to his sheer arrogance. Rams do not perceive everything as a threat.

I find that Jacob ewes do not readily accept grafted lambs. Some 10 years ago, one of our original ewes lost a lamb at birth. I had found her immediately after she had given birth, [probably a rear delivery] with the lamb plugged with mucus and trying to breath. I had read in sheep magazine that you could sometimes unplug a lamb by holding it by the rear legs and swinging it in a circle. I tried this and, amazingly, it seemed to work!...until the old ewe walked up behind me to see what the heck I was doing to her lamb and I smashed the lamb very hard on her horns. I decided to try and salvage the situation by grafting a spare lamb from a Finn's quads on the old girl. After spending 2 weeks with her head tied in a corner, she would still trounce the poor lamb unless I held her pinned against the wall while the lamb nursed. This got old. I relented , turned the old ewe out and resolved to feed the lamb on the bottle. Imagine my surprise to find the ewe in the barn bleating for the lamb. So from then on, twice a day I would go out to the sheep shed, turn the lamb out, the ewe would beat it up and then let it nurse. At least ONE of us learned something.
                                                Neal Grose
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.pairlist.net/pipermail/jacob-list/attachments/20010902/67c3a79a/attachment.html