Stereotypes

“I didn’t know that sheep had personalities,” a friend said. “I thought they were just white blobs on a hill.” Most people think of sheep that way. You usually see them from a distance; you don’t get to know them. They are just white blobs on a hill with all the attributes that people who don’t know them assign to sheep – stupid, timid, meek, embarrassed at having done something wrong, and if you’re a cattleman out west or grew up on cowboy shows - damaging to grasslands. All stereotypes.

Once you spend some up close and personal time with a sheep or two, you realize that they are not stupid. They know the importance of finding their next meal and will berate the shepherd who doesn’t provide food in a timely fashion.  They may be seen as timid when they run from dogs and coyotes who will kill them, but they aren’t timid at all when they stand between their lambs and that same dog, risking fatal bites to protect their children. They aren’t meek when I move a newborn lamb into a pen. The mother runs interference, almost knocking each other over trying to keep their lamb from being adopted by another ewe. 

In thirty years of raising sheep I’ve never seen an embarrassed sheep, although I have seen other personality traits. You see joy in a lamb bouncing and pronking around the pasture with other lambs. 

You hear loss in Dot’s plaintive calling for a dead lamb. You recognize good mothers in their infinite patience with their lambs. 

As for damage to grasslands, if the pasture is managed well, the sheep are moved to a new pasture when the old pasture needs time to regrow, then the sheep do no more damage than any other grazing animal.

Knowing a sheep changes her from a blob on the hill to an actual individual, a real sheep, just as knowing a friend turns them from just another person we pass during the day to someone we are glad to see, an individual. That knowing gives us insight into their thought processes, into their actions. It allows us to accept them as they are.

It works the same way with strangers, people who are different than us – people with a different color skin, speaking a different language, following a different religion. Our Somali friends frequently sound like they are arguing when they speak Somali together. But when I spoke to a group of Somali Elders about the possibility of a four day school week with a good translator, I knew what he said to them and I knew that what he passed on to me was a good translation of what they said.  I knew they weren’t arguing; they were just speaking loudly and fast. Many people raise their voice when speaking to someone with questionable English. We don’t raise our voices because we’re angry, we raise our voices in the mistaken idea that if we speak more loudly that non-English speakers, like some deaf people, will understand us better.

At first I thought that women who wore hijabs (the head covering of many Muslims) were doing so because their fathers or brothers or husbands made them dress that way. As I spoke to more Muslim women, I realized that their dress was their way if honoring their God, and that not all Muslim women felt the need to cover their heads to honor their God.

One third of the children in our community school don’t speak English at home, most of them are African, Asian, or Mexican, they don’t look like the blonde, blue eyed kids who went to school with my daughters thirty years ago. And yet, they still love having their teachers read them stories, their favorite lunch is still pizza, their favorite class is still recess. Children are children, no matter what their race or creed or color.

We fill our world with stereotypes, not real people. Just as a sheep is a white blob on a hillside, a person who looks different than my family and friends is just a blob on the hillside, not a real person with emotions, hopes and dreams similar to my own until I get to know them. And then, strangers can become friends, not stereotypes.

Surprise!

                                           photo by Amber Walker

Saturday morning, I woke to my grandson Jasper's shouts.
"Grandma, there are two babies in the barn!"

I had just been out there, four hours earlier, and decided that no one looked ready to lamb. No one even looked as if they would lamb before Jasper and Amber had to go home on Sunday. Even thirty years of lambing isn't enough to allow me to recognize a ewe about to go into labor. You'd think I'd have learned something after all those years.

Of course, after the first ewe lambed, I expect new babies every time I go out to the barn. I look for ewes  with sunken areas in front of their hip bones. We have three old ewes who look like that, but I'm pretty sure one of them isn't even pregnant and none of them has lambed in the last six days. I look for ewes who are reluctant to get up when I open the barn door in the morning. Lots of them exhibit that behavior, but so do I when Dave turns on the light to dress in the morning, and I'm certainly not pregnant. I look for really big, obviously pregnant  sheep, but most of them are in that state.

That's why we check the sheep every three to four hours, because we can't predict when a ewe will go into labor. It seems, like Jasper, I'll just be surprised when I find new babies in the barn.

Grafting a lamb

Grafting lambs is an iffy occupation. The need usually arises when a new mom dies or is too sick to nurse her baby. Then we try to persuade another mom to adopt that baby. The other reason to try a graft is when a mom loses her babies and has all that good milk going to waste, not to mention the anguish the mom feels for her lost baby. Sometimes, mom’s call for several days, trying to find dead lambs.

Dave went out to the barn to turn off a light on Tuesday night and found two moms and two new lambs! One of the moms was 56y. Neither of the lambs was hers; hers had both died a day ago. She was very interested, nose down, snuffling, calling to the new lamb.

Dave and I conferred about pros and cons. If we could get 56 to accept a new lamb, both lambs would have more milk to drink and would gain weight faster. If the graft didn’t work, if 56 didn’t accept the new lamb, his actual mom might not accept him back. That would leave us with one lamb getting a lot of milk from his mother and a bottle lamb, gaining weight not so well on lamb milk replacer.

Grafting usually doesn’t work. We have tied an older lamb’s legs together to fool a new mom into thinking it was her newborn. Didn’t fool her. We have put a ewe into a stanchion, trying to keep the ewe from sniffing a grafted lamb and therefore not realizing it wasn’t hers. Didn’t fool her. We have rubbed a newborn onto an older lamb hoping that the amniotic fluid would disguise the scent of the older lamb and the mom would accept the graft. She didn’t accept it. Our friend Glen has even skinned a dead lamb and tied its skin to an older lamb to make the new mom believe it was her lamb. That did work, but we weren’t in a position to skin anybody.

We followed our hearts and decided to graft one of the new lambs onto 56. Dave picked up the lamb and carried him slowly to a pen. He laid him in the glow of a heat lamp and stepped back. 56 came in, chuckling and baaing. She sniffed the lamb and immediately started licking him. Dave shut the pen door and watched. Soon the lamb was on his feet, searching for a nipple. When he found it, 56 stood quite still, allowing him to butt her udder and finally to nurse. Meanwhile ewe number 7g hadn’t realized that we’d stolen one of her babies. She chuckled contentedly and encouraged her remaining lamb to nurse.

It was a successful graft. The old mom really wanted a baby, and had milk. The newer ewe had had mastitis in the past and only produced milk on one side, so would have had a hard time feeding two babies. Two babies nursing on moms and no bottle babies. Perfect.

Surprise

Dave was excited when he came in from feeding the sheep. “Put on warm clothes,” he said, “I want to show you something, a surprise.” I bundled up and when we got to the barn told me to shut my eyes and led me in. Dave pulled me across the barn. I could hear the chickens muttering to each other. When I opened my eyes, there was a ewe in a jug and two heat lamps shining down on two white babies.



Obviously, that quick trip Winnie the Two had made over the fence in early September had been long enough. Most of our pastures were sere and brown by then, a combination of a hot dry July and August, and our not getting out to cut the warm season grasses so they wouldn’t go to seed. We try to cut each pasture just after the sheep have grazed it so nothing goes to seed before we put the sheep back on it. The sheep don’t like old, mature grass as well as young fresh grass, so the older grasses just keep maturing and when they go to seed, they stop growing and make no more young fresh grass leaves. If we can keep the pastures cut, each pasture lasts longer into the summer. By September, there was only one pasture that was moist enough to still have fresh green grass, the one right next to the ram pasture.

Our fences are old, but the ones around the ram pasture have been reinforced so many times that we thought they were impenetrable. We were confidant that the ewes would remain chaste even though they were grazing right next to the rams. The day we left for a ten day canoe adventure, Winthrop decided he needed an adventure too. He put his front legs on the fence, about three or four feet off the ground, pushed it down a foot or so, and hopped over. We’ve never had a ram as tall as Winnie before. Kate, our animal care person when we’re gone, saw that he was in the wrong pasture. She called a friend for help and together they put a leash around his neck and led him back home. He wasn’t happy, but he went. Then Kate reinforced that fence line with jug panels and 2X4’s.

Several days later when Kate went out to check on the animals, everyone was missing. Kate finally found Winnie and his ladies in the far west pasture. She called another friend and together, they drove the sheep back and separated Winnie out. Kate reinforced another part of the fence line. Winthrop hadn’t been with the ewes for an entire 24 hours, surely everything would be fine. January 26, we realized that we had been overly optimistic.

Monday night was not a good night for new lambs. The temperature had dropped to -21°F over night. The lambs were really cold. The male's ears were frozen and the wool on the girl’s legs was crispy with ice. We dried them off, slid a couple of baby pig warmers under their pen, hung two heat lamps a small electric heater – an accident waiting to happen. That’s not foreshadowing. We didn’t set the barn on fire.

The lambs seemed to warm. They drank colostrum from a bottle enthusiastically, but didn’t nurse on their mom. They weren’t very active lambs, but still, they weren’t shivering, were hungry and ate well.

We checked on the new lambs every three hours. They always drank well from the bottle and didn’t want to drink from their Mom. Dave fed them at 3 AM. When I went out at 7 neither lamb drank much and they both looked lethargic, ill. I left for a meeting and Dave went out to check their temperatures. The first lamb’s temperature was 94°, 10° below normal. He immediately called me home and filled the kitchen sink with hot water. My car didn’t start and when I finally got home an hour later, the first lamb was warmed up but the second lamb had died. We took the first lamb back out to his Mom. We were consoled by the fact that he was looking great.

Two hours later he was dead.

Dave talked to Dr. Weckwerth. Was this a repeat of last year’s problems, or was this hypothermia? Usually severely cold lambs don’t stand up, don’t nurse well. These lambs both nursed well. On the other hand, it didn’t seem like this could be hypothyroidism, the ewes had been on iodine for the last 9 months. What if it was something else entirely? What if it was something in our ewes or in our ram, in our land that produces our hay, or in our water? In his quiet, thoughtful way, Dr. Weckwerth said we didn’t have enough information yet to know what was going on. We’ve got two lambs that died. That’s not enough to see a pattern. It was really cold. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Emotional preparation for lambing

I woke up yesterday morning worrying about lambing. Last year began so well, two sets of healthy quadruplets. What a wonderful sight in the barnyard.

But from then on our year deteriorated. Our lambs grew weaker and began to die. They didn’t nurse well, they were cold even right after they were born. It was April. We normally lamb in February. There was no reason for them to be cold. We warmed them, fed them colostrum, rewarmed them, gave them antibiotics. Nothing helped.

We lost one third of our lambs before we even finished lambing. In desperation, I took two lambs to see Dr Weckwerth, an amazing vet. I took in a three week old who just seemed to be failing and a new born who just seemed to be failing as well. He listened to their hearts, felt folds of skin, took their temperatures, and drew blood for tests. As we were standing there, talking about what I’d been doing for the lambs I mentioned that several of them had lumps on their necks. He was instantly alert.

Hypothyroidism. Goiter. He still sent in the blood test, but he knew without even looking, our lambs were deficient in iodine and thus had hypothyroidism. I went home to check out our salt. It wasn’t iodized. How many years had we been feeding un-iodized salt. My recipe for mixing the coccidiostat said “mix with iodized salt”. I had always assumed we had iodized salt.

When I called around, only the elevator in Barnesville had iodized mixing salt. So I drove to Barnesville for salt. We began feeding iodine that day. When we were sure that everyone had gotten their fill of iodized salt, we wormed everyone and moved the lambs and ewes onto pasture.

A month later, we started losing lambs again. Lots of lambs had diarrhea. I took fecal samples to the vet. Worms. We wormed again. We wormed four times in a month. Some of the diarrhea cleared up, but some of the lambs were starving. The worms had done so much damage to their intestinal tracks that they lost blood and nutrients continually. DAve did some computer research. Turns out the ewes recover when you give them iodine. The lambs that were in utero while their thyroids were developing, never recover. They just didn't have enough thyroid function to fight off the worms.

Finally, in October, the dying stopped. We had lost over half the lambs and most of the rest never got beyond 65 or 70 pounds. Fortunately our buyers like animals in that weight range for barbeques.

I don’t know that I will survive another year like this last one. Hopefully with all the iodine we’ve been feeding and our move back to lambing in the winter, so we won’t have the lambs pasturing on worm infested ground in May and June - they’ll be out on clean pasture- we should have healthy lambs. We’ll know in 28 days. Lambing should begin February 26.

Sheep names

We bought two new ewes before Christmas. One, Mouse, was already named, but the second lamb needed a name. It has been our custom for years, to allow young friends to name new animals added to our flock. We give the child a topic based on the lamb’s mother’s name and they usually do quite well. For example, Brownie’s first baby was named “Chocolate chip” by a young friend. Fair’s first baby was named Cloudy. Polar Bear had a lamb named Teddy Bear. I thought I had a good technique, but when I asked a child to name Brownie’s second baby after his favorite food. He called her “Chicken”.

Even with that variation, our naming technique helped us remember who is related to whom and gives some help when we ask people to name lambs.

This fall, our grandson Jasper named a small brown wether that we added to the flock to be a friend for Winthrop the ram. The wether’s mother only had a number, so we let Jasper give him whatever name he wanted. Turned out he wanted “Shéngifr”, with a silent “r”. Now our grandson Kieran has named Mouse’s companion “Ervatungum” (pronounced air-va-tun-jum with an accent on the tun). At least we know that our grandkids are creative. Who knows what Ervatungum’s baby will be named.