Ta da!
The wonderful Dr. Dallas Caster came out yesterday to wether my ram lambs. He keeps Nubians himself, so he’s the go-to guy for everyone around here with goats or sheep. He wethered both boys, gave the lambs their CD/T boosters, and checked/trimmed/re-trimmed (my timid trials) the grown ups’ hooves lickety-split.
The wethering was easy peasy. He went with the elastrator, which works exactly the same as on the tails. It’s a tight little rubber band that is applied using a special pliers. The pliers with 4 special prongs stretches the band wide open. The empty scrotum is pulled through slack, then each testicle is shifted through the band and back down into the scrotum. Then the elastrator is closed so the band closed down around the top of the scrotum like a little drawstring pouch, and you check one last time to make sure both of the balls are int their little purse, then the band is rolled off the elastrator’s prongs, and the lamb is released without any fuss. If it bothers them at all, they show no sign of it. Hokey Pokey took all of 30 seconds to band. And Jayne, whose right testicle kept wandering away before it made it through the band, still only took a few minutes.
Like the tails, their little furry nutsacks will wither and fall off in 3-4 weeks, no fuss, no muss! Yay!
Mr. Shivers has a little Rob Courdry hairdo working right now. So far, he’s coat is heather gray, no sign yet of chocolate tips like last year.
Fudgy’s got kind of a high and tight going. By the end of the winter, she’ll have a luxurious afro. I love the little white spot on her nose.
I shoveled 10 heaping large wheelbarrows’ worth of old straw, hay & sheep poop out of the barn on Tuesday. I let it air out yesterday as best I could (the sheep wouldn’t stay out because it was so hot & shade’s scarce) before rebedding. But no one has straw right now, so I was stuck using old hay I got as a consolation prize from my straw lady. It’s all seeds and fine stems, so I’m really bummed it’s going to work itself into everyone’s fleeces and my careful blanketing will be for naught.
My blisters. I’m unaccustomed to shoveling muck.
Yesterday, I also worked with Ed a little on the fence, and today we’ve got another hot day of fencing ahead of us, although it looks like the high has been downgraded a few degrees. We’ll be Kansas-hot, not Texas-hot, thankfully. I suffer the winters here so I won’t have to suffer those Texas summers, so I’m especially whiny when Kansas goes all Texas on us in the summer. Last summer, we got a nice, lovely mild Kansas summer, and I’m hoping for another this year. (The summer before, Kansas got all pissy and made a Texas summer, which was crippling with no AC. I was on vacation for the very worst of it, but I still got a couple weeks of 100+, something I thought I’d opted out of when I moved.)
So will you save their little “you know what’s” when they fall off….ROTFLOL
so why do you wether the sheep?
Because intact rams can be very aggressive to the point of being dangerous to each other and to people–plus, I don’t want my flock getting any bigger!
I found after my first winter of sheep, that the hay bedding was just too hard to clean out in the spring (deep bedding kept the barn warmer in the Nova Scotia winter) and I switched to wood shavings from the local sawmill. MUCH easier to muck out and no weed seeds from the bedding in my gardens.
I LOVE your photos.