Sheep school

Yesterday was one of the twice-a-year days when we host first year students from Unity College's Captive Wildlife Care and Education degree program for training in animal handling using sheep.

The sheep need the handling, while the students need the experience, so this is a good trade for all of us. The sheep, for their part, get all their shots, their hoofs trimmed, their dung tags removed, and so on, the 3,000 mile service.

While the students get what we believe is exceptionally good experience, handling large, balky and even hostile animals.

Timing is everything, and in this case the timing was great for the students, but not so good for the sheep. We had hoped to get the students in before lambing, but as usual the stupidity of the college schedule defeated our plans.

If I ever happen to meet the absolute moron it was that decided one fine day that something useful to humanity could be learned in a fifty minute class, and then filled up students', and faculty members' days with these classes, carefully spaced apart so as to allow only a minimal amount of time for practicing difficult things or concentrating hard on tricky jobs, or, well, just plain thinking about things, well, I'll have something to say to that person.

My idea of a good class is at least a half a day, maybe more, of practical application solidly linked to theory.

We had two hours and ten minutes, and made the best of things. I had everything set up ahead of time, and we worked our way though the animals as methodically as we could in the time available.

We started with a good scrubbing of student's welly boots in disinfectant, to remove or kill any disease organisms from other farms, or the zoos and wildlife centers that these students regularly visit.

We then had a good briefing, in which their major professor, Cheryl Frederick and I emphasized that what we were about to do would be hard work, dirty, unpleasant, risky to the animals, and based on hard science. This is an important moment because the students in this particular program sometimes arrive with what I call the "Animal Planet" mentality, which is something along the lines that cute, fuzzy animals are entertaining, and that because I'm in this degree program and not, say, straight biology, I don't have to take the hard biology classes that are required, or at least, I don't have to take them seriously.

These students, along with the Marine Biology students, I'm sorry to say, routinely get the worst grades in genetics, cell biology, and similar "hard" courses, as well as in math. They often see these more abstract courses as unpleasant and unnecessary.

(This is particularly frustrating to Aimee, who often comes home quite angry about it.)

Whereas in reality, all serious modern animal care and medicine is applied biology, and if students don't pay attention in genetics or cell biology, they may not fully understand procedures, and, in their future careers, at best they'll have to resort to the use of rote systems and depend on others to actually work out systems of care, being handicapped in doing it themselves by their ignorance of the biological basis of care.

At worst, they'll kill animals.

Which we nearly did yesterday, more of which later.

So the students got a five minute briefing in which we connected the systems of care they would learn to the biology in classes, emphasized the hard work and need for grit and guts in handling the animals. Seeing a few glazed eyes and minds already wandering (which is normal for first years, but not good, a sign of poor high-schooling and short attention spans and the like), we made eye contact, and I made sure they were paying attention with a mild but gruff warning.

Once we had their full attention and minds on task, we got stuck in.

With only two hours to go, everything had to be set up ahead of time. Earlier I had penned the sheep into the back of the barn, where they spend the winter. This is a safe place for them and they were quiet and settled. I stepped in and started handing out lambs, one by one. Each lamb got a subcutaneous injection of tetanus vaccine. The students gave the shots. They had earlier been told how to do it, and then we showed them how, with the first lamb; after that each student got to inject a lamb, and later, the ewes.

The best place to inject a sheep with tetanus vaccine or any other subcutaneous medicine is in one of the four "armpits," the area of bald, loose skin on the inside where the limb meets the body. It's easy to pinch up a flap of this skin, insert the needle, and inject the medicine right under the skin layer, avoiding muscle tissue and blood vessels.

The students had been warned that as soon as the ewes were separated from the lambs all kinds of noise would break out, making it hard to concentrate, and this duly occurred as babies were separated from mothers.

Each lamb was then returned to the lambing pen, still isolated from the mothers.

The next job was to work on the mothers themselves, and just naturally the angriest mothers presented themselves first at the gate of their pen, very hostile, and bleating for their babies. It was a simple matter to let them out one at a time, catch them, and take them outside into the sun for their routine work.

A romantic notion of sheep handling might have left the lambs with the mothers, but this might have resulted in lambs getting crushed while mothers were caught.

Again, students need to learn to let go of soppy sentiments and plan out systems of handling and care that are best for the animals and realistic of the difficulties involved.

Taking the angriest mothers first this way was good, because that meant we got all the most difficult sheep done first. And of course, first of all was Nellie, then Tillie, then Molly, then Poppy.

Tillie is probably our Number One best mother, and most experienced. But Nellie is the most caring mother we have. Molly is an easy third, and Poppy is just learning, so the order in which the angry sheep appeared at the gate was just naturally the exact order of their ranking of motherly ethic.

Our Corriedale-Romney cross sheep are big, solid and very strong, no pushovers. A Corriedale ewe is just naturally one of the finest and feistiest mothers in the animal world. All the mothers wanted very badly to be back with their babies.

It was no mean feat to catch each one, give her a shot, trim hooves and dung tags.

Once fixed up, the mothers could then go back to the paddock,, and each set of lambs could then be brought out, given five cubic centimeters of vitamin paste (containing selenium for protection against white muscle disease), and then released to the mothers.

The noise level slowly dropped.

A moment of quiet drama ensued when a student accidentally nicked one of Tillie's arteries with the needle while giving the tetanus shot. Bright red blood leaked out of the wound under the skin, making a bulge.

This might easily have caused Tillie's death. What happens is that the slug of liquid medicine in the blood vessel becomes in effect an embolism, and if it enters the blood vessels of the heart, can stop that organ beating.

This is called thrombosis, and humans get it too, when we have a "stroke."

Luckily it was one of Tillie's arteries that was hit, not a vein, based on the bright red color of the blood that we saw.

Arterial bleeding from a puncture wound will usually stop, so I wasn't worried about Tillie bleeding to death. But I was worried about a thrombosis.

But again we were lucky in that it was an artery and not a vein, and so any medicine that made it into the vessel would have had to have been pushed through capillaries and the tissue they serve, and so necessarily dispersed before making it to a vein, then to the heart. In addition, the pressure in an artery is greater, so it's harder to push the medicine in to the blood vessel. More likely the arterial pressure pushed the medicine out, and we had instead a bulge of blood mixed with medicine under the skin, which would go away eventually, and the medicine would still be effective.

This accident was partly my fault for not mentioning as positively as I should have that it was important to get the medicine just under the skin, and not in a muscle or blood vessel.

I showed the students how to do it, but I didn't tell them this last part.

And not all students were perhaps paying full attention to the demonstration.

Again, if we could only have them for longer periods, so things weren't so rushed, this kind of mistake would be harder to make.

Once we realized what we had done, we just stopped work, let Tillie go, found her lambs and gave them back to her, and then just watched her for a few minutes to make sure she didn't keel over.

And she didn't.

Phew. Good lesson for students, better lesson for instructor.

One way to be sure that you haven't nicked a blood cell is to pull back on the syringe after the needle is inserted but before depressing the plunger, but this is usually not needed for a simple subcutaneous shot like this one.

Next time I'll be even more gruff about getting everyone's attention, and make sure each student sees the demonstration before doing the job themselves. Also, when I was training to be a military medic we practiced on skin/muscle analogs -- loose skinned oranges, actually, but I'm sure we can buy something bespoke from a hospital supply warehouse.

The student that gave the faulty shot was very surprised when we assigned her to give the very next shot. But you have to get right back on the horse that threw you while the adrenaline is still in your system. If you don't fear may take over, and you may never succeed at learning the job.

She did a much better job of the next injection. Well done.

After a while all the mothers were happily reunited with their lambs and the mayhem quieted. The remaining sheep got quite a bit of attention, except for Jewel, the second oldest ewe, who characteristically fought us all off, and went into the paddock without treatment.

This may not be such a bad thing, as it may soon be time to take her to the butchers.

I perhaps should have mentioned this too to the students, but an old retired ewe like Jewel will die eventually, either as her teeth wear out, or as she gets one or more of the hundreds of dread diseases of sheep. Jewel herself took ill last year, to Listeriosis or "circling diesease" and nearly died.

It's much better for them to die quickly in the slaughterhouse and for us to get the meat (which I usually have ground up for shepherds pie and sausage), than it is to die of starvation from worn-out teeth, or from some dread disease.

Cheryl and her academic partner in this program, Sarah Cunningham, make sure to prepare students for this kind of eventuality. The very first lecture the students get is on death, an immediate inoculation against the "Animal Planet" mentality.

And the first (lesson) shall be the last (lesson).

All are well

Well, it's two days since Poppy the balky shearling momma gave birth to her male twin lambs, and things have only slowly improved for the two near-orphans.

You may remember that Poppy dropped her first lamb on the cold hard ground Thursday morning, initiating a series of minor lamb emergencies. She failed to lick and otherwise stimulate the newborn, which then failed to get to his feet and quickly became hypothermic, while shepherd-boy here was looking the other way. The little wain was saved only by twenty minutes under a heat lamp.

After which Poppy refused to feed him, or his little brother. Each time they tried ever so pathetically to find the teat, she'd shy away. The little brother was born in the lambing pen onto warm bedding, and so was at least warm and didn't require the heat lamp. But lambs require a feed within the first hour or two or they lose energy and die. The first feed also contains a lot of the mother's colostrum, vital for lamb health.

So Thursday morning we (the Royal we -- herself was off at work, clean and dry) spent quite a lot of time on our knees in the lambing pen holding Poppy down with one or the other lamb on the teat.

Then "we" had to go to work for so-called essential meetings beginning at 11am. Racing home at around 3.30 pm, we arrived to find both lambs alive but a little cold and losing energy.

So it was back to force-feeding for Poppy, our flock's official Worst Mother of the Year.

They survived the night, and it was during the night that Poppy began to relent, allowing small, short feedings if one of us was in the pen with her.

I think she must have realized that this was preferable to being held down. Even so, she was held down for the penultimate time at the 3.30 am night check.

Friday morning dawned to find two somewhat cold lambs still, so Poppy was held down again. This turned out to be the last time this was needed. I hurried off for a long day at a high school energy event with two of our graduating seniors, who were presenting. I made it home by 3.30 pm and since both lambs were standing and it was warm and sunny, I let them out, and instead of holding Poppy down, I gave them each a bottle. They drank a half a cup of milk replacer each, which is a pretty big feed for such tiny babies, so they must have been hungry.

Later that evening I saw them both jump around a little and test out their legs for the first time, a very good sign. Momma Poppy was still not minding them properly, and they were still the hungriest kids on the block.

Finally, during the 3.30 pm night checks I saw both lambs feed together, one teat each as nature intended, for a good long time.

Home free?

We'll have to see. But it was a very hopeful sign.

So far this year we've not lost a single lamb. We've been lucky. Last year we lost three lambs and two ewes (one and two), mostly because we were even busier at work and so not there when lambs were born, but also because we had a warmer spring and so the standard sheep diseases, tetanus, listeriosis, and fly-strike got going before we were quite ready for them.

So, although the cooler, snowier late winter weather has been a downer, it's been good for the ewes and lambs, and good for the Womerlippi bottom line.

(Meaning we lose less money on the sheep herd than we usually do.)

Time to call the shearer, though, and we'll get those fleeces off before the really warm weather comes.

Cold lamb

Today's "Lambing Live" drama was a hypothermic lamb. Poppy, a shearling ewe, didn't quite know what to do with her first baby, so she left it on the cold hard frosty ground for quite a while.

I'm not sure how long. It doesn't take long when the ground is iron-hard and twenty degrees.

Of course, we try to watch them like hawks this time of year. I'd been up on night checks at 9am, 2.30am, 4am, and then every forty minutes or so.

But once the sun was up, I was struggling with a big round bale and a balky tractor and trailer, trying to feed the rest of the sheep. I heard the little one before I saw it, and picked it right up, but it was already cold.

Poppy had her own problems. She was backing into a brush heap, totally terrified of what was happening to her body.

To begin, I just bought Poppy and the lamb in and put them in a lambing pen with a heat lamp.

But Poppy didn't so much as lick the newborn even once.

Holding Poppy down, I squirted a little milk in his mouth, direct from the teat, but that didn't bring him round either.

After about another half hour of this, I bought the little one in, popped it in a blue WalMart tub in the kitchen with a heat lamp. Normally they go under the wood stove, but the stove was out.

Yet another use for those blue WalMart tubs. We must have twenty of the things around here.

Then I sterilized the intubation kit, just in case. But I didn't need it.

After a while the lamb was trying to stand in the tub, but his mouth was still cold when I stuck my finger in. Still, he did suckle. When they really go down they can't even do that. So back in the pen with mom he went. He tried gamefully to find the nipple but he was still too weak, and mom was more concerned about her second newborn so she didn't help much. She kept putting her leg in his way, and he'd fall over and have to try again.

So then we laid Poppy out once more, and put the lamb on the nipple. After a little initial confusion, with Poppy pinned firmly under my left knee (complaining loudly at this treatment) so she had no choice in the matter, I got him a good feed.

And then back under the heat lamp. If he follows the usual pattern, he'll sleep off that first feed and then when he gets up the next time he should be strong enough to find the nipple on his own.

And when I last saw them Poppy was giving the cold one a good licking.

And yes, the BBC does actually have a reality TV show called "Lambing Live." It's my new favorite show. Right up there with "University Challenge."

But Aimee prefers "Survivor."

I'm not giving you a link to Survivor.

You can find it yourself.

Lamb-book

Aimee's pictures of this years lambs, so far, on her Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2009689&id=120000357&l=5ba7948c82

Three more

I came home at 1pm expecting a trip to go get another round bale, but Molly had given birth, so I needed to get mother and child into the second
lambing pen.

Then I noticed Tillie was missing. And, of course, she had chosen to give birth to a little white lamb, in the rain in the mud down at the end of the loafing area.

So it was another game of lamb rugby. Luckily I won, dropping the lamb inside the outside door of the lambing pen just before Tillie dropped me.

Poor little lamb, born in the mud, and to cap it all, Tillie is very aggressive at kicking lambs and hoofing them until they get to their feet. The lamb was just covered in mud as well as blood from the birthing.

Here's the area of mud that Tillie tilled up trying to get this lamb to stand.

Then Tillie squeezed out another, this one black, with no trouble at all. So she has one black lamb, and one white one covered in mud.

Mollie, on the other hand, was sensible this year and gave birth indoors, to a nice clean lamb.

Last year she gave birth all the way at the end of the North Paddock, in the dark.

Sh**ty little lambie sits out silly snow storm

We had to bring one of Nellie's new lambs in for a bath. The orange-yellow poop that lambs have while still at the teat sometimes sticks to their fleece. Most mothers will clean it up, but not our Nellie, I guess. Shameless! This lamb had a fairly big old slab of pure lamb-merde encrusted to her leg.

A little soapy water and she was ready to go. Mom was glad to have her back, but says can we use scented dish soap next time?

In other news, we had a fairly big dump of wet spring snow yesterday, seen here on Aimee's beloved Camry.

Yes, there is a car under that snow drift.

We got one last snow day for the year, making six or seven total, plus 14 inches by Aimee's reckoning. I have to say it may have been more like a foot and a half of snow because she was measuring on the picnic table, and there was a stiff breeze throughout the storm which would have blown some of the snow away from the table.

It took an hour with the tractor yesterday and two hours today to move all the snow out of the way. We were on our own for this one. The town plow only just showed up, 30 hours after the storm began. But neighbor Ham plowed out to the road sometime during the night, so we were only snowed in temporarily. The power flickered off and on quite a few times and we know that 3,500 homes in the county to the south went without power for a day or so, but despite some flickering, we have power still. It probably helped a great deal that the line crew cleared the Great Farm's power distribution line where it comes through the woods, widening the corridor and taking out hundreds of trees that were crowding the line.

Now it's 40 F out there and getting warmer in the sun, and I expect much of this new snow will melt today or tomorrow, and what is left will be rained on Tuesday, so we expect to be back to spring-like conditions by the middle of the week.

Luckily, no more lambs appear to have been born. I say "appear." We may not know for sure. I greatly dislike late spring snow storms because a ewe may decide to drop her lambs off in a snowbank somewhere. The lambs can't dry off and if not found right away may die of hypothermia. We then find one or more dead lambs after the snow melts.

So we've been extra careful to get out every few hours and observe the ewes, including in the dead of night. Night checks are a drag, but it helps I have an aging bladder and have to get up anyway, while Aimee generally stays up late, and so can check before she comes to bed.

I think Tillie will be next to give birth. She's huge, her teats are swollen, and the lambs seem to have shifted in her belly. Mollie, on the other hand, has a bright pink vulva, so she may be getting ready too.

Of the two year-and-a-half-old ewes who will give birth for the first time this year, and whose P-names I can never remember (Poppy and Penelope?) only the white one is obviously "showing."

This year is "R," and Aimee has decided on "Roxy" and "Rhea." The first ram lamb we see is likely to be "Rivet."

I thought of that one, and am quite proud of myself. I might see how "Rigger" goes down too, whether or not I can get the wifely approval, and then we'll have a series going in honor of RAF technical lingo.

When we get to "S" next year, we can have "Sooty" and "Sumpy" (RAF slang for engine-bashers). Especially if they're black lambs.

Something to look forward to.

Dead Cheryl

I thought I would get into trouble yesterday. I killed our rooster Cheryl.

Murderer Mick!

This little tyrant has been tormenting me for months. After my last rooster, which also attacked me regularly, I swore "never again," but relented when one of the hen-chicks Aimee ordered from Murray McMurray Hatchery turned out to be a rooster.

But I finally had enough. I was out in the woods close to the barn with the dogs, trying, of all things, to take a quiet whiz, when Cheryl sidled up. He came a little to the left, a little to the right, coming in at diagonals, getting closer every time, trying to stay on my blind side.

Like I couldn't actually see him! What a sneak. The Libyan opposition could learn tactics from this rooster.

Naturally, I felt just slightly more exposed than usual, with my fly down and all. Is nothing sacred? When a guy can't take a leak in his own woods, there's something wrong with the world. But I kept an eye on him, and nothing much happened.

Until I pulled up my zipper and turned my back to leave, when the little bugger flew at me, all spurs and beak!

This was the last straw. Not only has he attacked me about thirty or forty times, but he lords it over the hens like a monster, and it's only a matter of time before he attacks someone else, our elderly neighbor to the west, or the young mother and baby that live to our north, who come by with stroller every day to get the mail.

A short hour after this, the last of Cheryl's attacks, he was in the crock pot with the power turned up to full. End of. I fed his entrails to the hens.

Waste not, want not.

It was while I was hanging him to be plucked that it occurred to me that I should probably have talked this over with Aimee. After all, she raised him from a chick, and he was a very pretty rooster, in Pittsburgh Steeler colors and all. But Aimee was at work.

This gives you an idea of the capriciousness of my death sentence decision: If I hadn't come home early to watch over the new lambs, Cheryl would still be alive.

So when Aimee came home late after giving an exam, I told her that I'd done "a very bad thing."

"What did you do?"

"I killed our rooster?"

"Oh." "OK..."

"...give me a hand to unload this stuff, will you?"

I guess Cheryl's life didn't amount to much around here.

Pretty good sized bird though. Almost couldn't fit him in the crock pot.