I had nothing to do with this one. In fact, my exact words were, "No! They are nothing but problems....No." But, I guess I shouldn't really have been surprised when my words were not heeded.....she was really kind of cute.
It is a problem when the bus driver, who sees your kids every day and talks with them, also happens to raise sheep. It was early spring, lambing season, and he happened to talk with the kids about taking on a bottle baby lamb. The kids, of course, then passed this on to Keith.
We had just put a new roof on the "chicken shed" but had agreed that there was plenty of room in it to add a few other animals. Little did I know how quickly that would happen....a bit like Field of Dreams "if you build it, they will come".
Somehow, and here is where is all gets a little questionable as to who actually called whom initially, but Gene and Keith somehow got to talking. I have my suspicions that it was Keith that called Gene. Regardless, I came home from work to find a small, weak, seven day old lamb in my kitchen. She was all legs and really not much else - nothing to her. She was one of a set of triplets, and while sheep do alright with two lambs, three is a bit of a stretch to feed. This one apparently, was the odd man out at almost all the feedings. According to the bus driver, she had been drinking from a bottle, but that first night (and for many following nights) we struggled to get any milk down her at all.
We took her out to the shed because I just didn't feel that it was good to get her used to living in the kitchen....that didn't work - it was just too dark and cold to leave that tiny little beast out there all alone! We tried to introduce our outdoor dog, in the hopes that her Great Pyrenees breed would come out and take to her....no go, but she did almost have lamb chops for dinner. We thought that maybe even something like a cat would befriend her and help her out....nope, they were too freaked out by her, but they did want her milk.
Back in the house we went and we set up a place in the basement for her to live. The containment was essentially the same as the original brooder that we had used for the chicks when they first came. This confinement lasted all of about 20 minutes. But, she did find a spot in the corner to call her own, so we went with it and moved the straw and blankets to that corner of the basement which was close to the wood burning stove....smart lamb.
Approximately one week into this little lamb adventure and she still wasn't gaining any weight. That is not a good thing in a young lamb's life. Babies of all species need to be taking in enough nutrients and calories to grow - she hadn't grown a bit. We despaired that maybe she wasn't going to make it. Then I stopped and remembered that I am, in fact, a veterinarian and should know how to handle this conundrum.
The next day at work I gathered together a few items that I thought might be of help, namely a 60 cc syringe and a red rubber feeding tube. She had to have nutrients one way or another and if she didn't take it in herself, then she was going to get it via feeding tube. In general, this isn't too difficult of a thing to do for most animals. Sliding a tube to the back of the throat naturally elicits a gag reflex and they swallow and if you pass the tube with the swallow....it goes down the right tube. I showed my husband how to check to be sure that it is in the stomach - there should be negative pressure on the syringe when you pull back. If the syringe fills with air, you have inadvertently passed the tube into the trachea, or windpipe, and that can cause huge problems if you were to then pass the formula down that tube right into the lungs.
So, after refreshing myself with how to do this, and then teaching Keith how to do this, "Lambie" was thereafter subjected to three times daily feedings whether she liked it or not. That, and a shot of penicillin and she was well on her way to gaining weight.
We tube fed her for about three weeks and then, finally, the grass started to green up a bit and suddenly she realized that she was a herbivore. She never looked back after that point, but she had developed quite a bad habit of coming into the house. For the three weeks that she was being tube fed, she occupied a spot either behind our front door amongst the shoes, or downstairs in the basement by the wood stove. She bonded to my husband because he was, after all, her main care giver. She followed him all over the farm and would bound around him like a crazy gazelle, pronking, leaping and inadvertently running headlong into him and anything else that was in her way.
I think the original plan was to raise her up and then take her to the local butcher shop. That is very hard to do with animals that you have tube fed, worried over, and then watched grab hold of life for all they are worth and enjoy it with as much vivacity as a baby lamb. I suspect now that Lambie is a permanent, life long resident of the farm.
A Fence Emerges
As much fun as it was to have a lamb come traipsing into the house, it was also kind of messy as they are not exactly careful about where they leave their deposits. We had to have another place for her to stay. The north corner of the chicken house was fixed up into a very nice stall for her to stay in during the nights and during the day, she wandered around with Keith. We needed a fence however, and this became readily obvious when she wandered up to the house and happily started nibbling on my tulips. She is actually lucky to have survived that event at all.
A fence was planned out and materials purchased. I attempted to set a few posts, but as is typical, they were not just the way Keith had pictured in his mind, so I let him take over and slowly, the fence emerged. "Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight, and bull-strong. " Keith got all of those with the fence that he put in. You would often see him out there tamping in a post with Lambie attempting to climb on his back.
There is a reason that I originally said, "No" to this whole lamb idea. I grew up with a bottle lamb, actually two of them....Burt and Ernie. Ernie wasn't bad, but Burt would head butt you really hard any chance he got. I was happy the day that Burt left the homestead. We had another sheep at some point too named "Doc" and he would get out and promptly steel something from the shed and drop it somewhere out in the yard. This became a real problem when my dad was fixing a car and the sheep kept running off with parts. Lambie was working at becoming as much of a nuisance as Burt and Doc had been, but the fence did seem to help rein her in a little. Add to that pasture a Shetland pony that we had received a few years earlier and they were pretty good buddies. The thing that we didn't realize in putting in the fence was that the chickens now were within a pasture as well. We thought that they would leap over it - they are fully capable of leaping at least as high as the fence, but they seemed oddly content to stay within its confines as well. We now had quite a farm yard - chickens ranging around, a pony and a willy-nilly sheep that seemed to get a profound kick out of herding the feisty rooster "Brownie" around. She was the only one that he didn't spur every chance he got, he would instead flee from her. I think it was mainly that she was just so unpredictable - like a bipolar person off their meds, you just never knew what she might do.
Food is a huge thing for Lambie - almost ironic in some ways given that we couldn't get her to eat for the first three weeks of her life. She and Casper vie for any chicken feed that they can possibly lick out from under the dog of the chicken coop, and if anyone happens to leave a door unlocked you can bet that Lambie will be in there and she doesn't hesitate to let in anyone else to help with feasting on any food that she can uncover. More than once we have come into the chicken shed to find it in complete disarray with Lambie happily munching down on cat food and a flock of chickens at her feet helping as well.
How To Shear a Sheep (or Not)
If we weren't going to use her for lunch meat, we had to come up with some purpose for her existence on the farm.....not that the horses really have much use, but they clean up any hay that we have lying around. Sheep are a wonderful dual purpose farm animal - meat and fiber are both possibilities, so we opted for the fiber. We weren't about to splurge on an electric clippers for one sheep, so we thought that we would try the old fashioned way of shearing a sheep - hand shears. If you have never seen one of these, they look like really big, sharp, metal scissors that are sprung so that the only motion you have to do is to close the scissors to snip the wool. Biggest drawback is that it requires a strong wrist to use these babies and you are working on a living animal that is not always lying still, so you are almost bound to snip the skin periodically as well as the wool.
Lambie had no idea what was coming for her the morning that we decided to give it a try. The entire family meandered out to the pasture to watch the event. The book makes this look like a fairly simple thing. Usually, when you get a sheep set up on their butt, they kind of relax and stop wrestling.....or so the book says. Lambie clearly did not read this part of the book. The book also shows just one person doing the shearing and holding the sheep all at the same time. Clearly, this was a person who had had more practice than we did.
She came to Keith, as she always does, and he attempted to get her set up the way the book describes, on one hip. The hard part was that she weighs almost as much as Keith does. What followed was similar to watching a wrestling match, and unfortunately Keith wasn't coming out the victor without a serious fight. It was amazing to see how many legs a four legged creature seemed to have when she was struggling to stand up right. Eventually, she was brought down for the count, but it was more or less on her side and it took both of Keith's hands to keep her that way so there was no way that he was going to be able to use the shears at the same time.
I launched in with the sheep shears and managed to get going on quite a roll. Once you find the plane in the wool that is actually clean, it goes along quite nicely, but then you have to flip the sheep over at some point. This allowed Lambie the upper hand for the moment and she used it to her best advantage. She jumped up and was off like a shot having now decided that these people were clearly out of their minds. The book also mentions trying to keep the fleece clean. This is very hard to do when half of it is still attached to the sheep as they are running through all kinds of farmyard muck.
Another few minutes to catch her, another wrestling match and she was down on the other side and the sheering could continue. The only time she would really flail was when the shears would inadvertently pinch some skin, but unfortunately that usually led to a hoof to the head or a lip or some other sensitive body part.
Eventually, the wool was off. It wasn't necessarily pretty, but it was off. Lambie looked a little like a piece of foam that had had chunks cut out of it, but she didn't seem to mind all the kids giggling at her new do. Now, what to do with the fleece, which was nowhere near "fleecy white" It was full of dirt, manure and straw. Washing was the first order of business.
Dawn dish soap, Woolite and a lot of patience are necessary to get wool clean. I washed it twice and got all the gross disgusting things out of it. I wasn't perfectly clean, but good enough to start carding. I found some carding combs on ebay and had them in hand within a few weeks.
Now, I would love to be able to say that I have taken the time to card and spin the wool, but unfortunately, I have not. It sits where it has been for several months and taunts me with tracking down my grandmother's spinning wheel which currently resides at my parent's house. Maybe with next spring's wool, which I picture as a perfect, clean fleece obtained from a calm, relaxed sheep, I will feel inspired to card and spin it all. But then again, it is Lambie I am dealing with.
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