Broken Horn

8:38 PM, Saturday, 6 February 2010
Temperature: 45F, drizzly and calm

Today was a long, busy day. Feeding the animals came first of course, followed by making coffee to start the day's progress.

The first task of the day was to get lambs out of the enclosure with the rams. Singlehanded, this is not particularly easy. The approach was to use some surplus electric mesh netting, not charged, and make a temporary makeshift catchpen, then to enter the pen and use hands and crook to take the lambs, separate them from the rest, and then to transport them over to the other enclosure.

The whole system works best when some provision is made for their natural inclination to flee. A long, narrow corridor gives them room to run in a direction, but narrow enough that with each pass, the desired sheep can be hooked with a crook, and grabbed.

Failures mostly resulted from sheep getting tangled in the mesh. This was not all bad - tangled lambs are easy to grab, although untangling takes a little time. Not encumbered, even a small lamb has amazing pulling power and dexterity. At a dead run, a lamb can make a hairpin turn.

The idea was not to distress the lambs (or other sheep, like the pregnant ewes in the same enclosure) too much, so one which got out of the catching area was left to graze, and another which inadvertently got her horn knocked off her horn bud was left as well. The horn will grow back, and it's not a serious wound, but all considered the lamb suffered enough distress for one day.

A lamb which is upright will try very hard to escape, so it makes things easier if they are turned on their side or back. This counts as well if they are being carried. A lamb carried on its side is quieter.

Later in the day, after a rest, the rest of the work was on the grazing arks. They are nearly done, but some glue needs to set first. Tomorrow, we should be able to get rabbits on our land.
The grazing arks have chickenwire all around, so that the rabbits can reach the grass, but can't burrow.