Archive for August, 2008

Our first sheep injury!

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

calvin1.jpg

Calvin was favoring his hind right leg. Where to go for help?

A few days ago, in the midst of a routine check (water and alfalfa pellets; and getting rid of the manure pellets), I was horrified to see that Baby Calvin, our beloved ram lamb and second in command to General Firefly, was hobbling on three legs.

I went into triage mode: A fractured leg? A sprain? A gash? An abscess in the hoof?

John and I corralled Baby Calvin and took a look. No swelling. No fracture. A tiny abrasion at the top of his hoof. Nothing that a bit of hydrogen peroxide wouldn’t fix.

Time to check in with my sheep compatriots at the Yahoo HFSheep group

Sharing sheep thoughts is a good thing, and here are some we got in response to our questions (I am so appreciative of this listserv):

  • Is he still limping? I think I’d keep an eye on that. Such a small injury shouldn’t cause him that much distress. Maybe he ran into something and that caused the abrasion as well as a good deal of body soreness?

  • I’m leaning towards him having it caught in something, if the wound is so small, yet he’s still limping. When Norman decided to hang upside down from the back fence by his back leg, I thought at first he’d either snapped it or at the very least dislocated his hip, given the awful position it was in. I somehow found the strength to lift him to untangle him from the fence (at nearly 3/4 my entire body weight!)… After a few mins he could put his leg down, but was limping badly. I got him inside and checked him over and could only find a small wound about 1 x 2″, but was more just a wire burn as opposed to a gash… He limped badly for a few days. Then over the next fortnight he improved, to the point where the limping stopped completely… I’d say his limping was due to overworked muscles, like when you go to the gym for the first time…  Is (Calvin) weightbearing on it? If so, I’d give it another week or so and if he’s still limping maybe get it x-rayed, but it sounds similar to what Norman did and if that’s the case, he should be fine.
  • I understand being nervous about the limping. When we first got our mama ewes, maybe a month or so before they were due one got a limp and I thought she was going to go down, and she would be done for! She got over it in about 3 days. I just had another one get gimpy, probably because she hurt herself running away from me and the ointment (she had a rash on her belly). I think she took about 3 days to get over it too. Our ewes have been fighting a lot due to hormones, I assume. Maybe the lamb got in the middle of a bashing contest.
  • Have you checked his temperature? I have had two cases of infections causing a limp and when antibiotic was given in both cases the limp went away as well. Just a thought!

Tonight, Baby Calvin is walking on all four legs and chewing his cud. He’s a good boy and we look forward to seeing him strut his stuff in breeding season. As to the limp: I’m very sure that the Texas soil got to him: big fissures with crevices that might have caught up his leg and pulled a muscle. Happens to the best of us.  And thank you, Hobby Farms discussion list. It’s nice to be surrounded by friends.

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Preparing the earth

Friday, August 29th, 2008

First sprouts of the season
Fall garden tilled and ready

It’s Labor Day weekend, so in that spirit I vanished from work an hour early so as to commence laboring. Wait a minute, something is wrong with this picture! After two hours of wrestling a tiller as cooperative as a rodeo steer, we now have a cozy 15′x35′ space ready for planting. Tomorrow Frances will introduce a variety of peat pots into this fertile plot. It will be our first introduction to Texas gardening, exotic to us for its two balmy growing seasons bisected by three months of pure hellfire. Into the ground will go a variey of herbs, including dill, basil, oregano, green onions, spinach, lettuce, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. (I suspect this last item is a not-so-subtle attempt to secure my labor since I adore those little cabbages.)

Although the tilling was a hassle, I got to enjoy a zen moment an hour into the exercise. I remembered a long-ago visit to Old Sturbridge Village, where employees dress, talk and act like early 19th century New England farmers. They are what passed for farmers to me until we moved to rural Texas this year.  Everything about the Village was fascinating to me, the stony earth neatly partitioned into furrows, the working blacksmith shop, the flowering herb gardens. It never seemed to bother me that it was make-believe, staffed primarily by vacationing teachers and history buffs.

We have no idea as yet what will grow and what won’t in the thick Texas clay. Hope to hear from others who have undertaken this same process.

sprouts.jpg
Peat pots prepared for planting

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Update on coop situation

Monday, August 25th, 2008

Under the heading of “If you can’t beat it, pretend to like it,” the Gang of 5 is starting to adjust to the presence of the skeletal structure of the future chicken coop. They take turns standing within the 10′x15′ perimeter. (They have their choice of 20-plus acres, and instead they stand on that postage stamp.) In addition, there have been unconfirmed reports of pecking and scratching. Film at 11…

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Butch Cassidy and the Shetland Sheep

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Sheep keep a careful eye on change

Remember that part in the movie, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” when our heroes are being tracked relentlessly by lawmen? In the old days, Butch and the Kid had had free rein to rob passing trains. But with time comes progress and with progress comes change and change is seldom good for the incumbents. So it was that our sheeply Gang of 5 greeted with some large dollop of suspicion the tarp that suddenly appeared without explanation yesterday on a 10×15 foot plot of land in the pasture. It is covering what will soon be a coop. And where there is a coop, chickens are rarely far behind. But that’s getting a little ahead of the story for our sweet sheep. All they know is something has changed. Not good for the incumbents.

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The circle

Saturday, August 16th, 2008

We’re fairly realistic folks and have lived life long enough to know that sometimes things can go terribly wrong. Still, nothing prepared us for the shock of arriving home to find Francie dead. Her collar had caught on a fence she was attempting to scale. Of the two Great Pyrenees pups, Francie was the instigator of trouble. She was on her way to find trouble, no doubt, when the accident happened. I would like to think that this was just a wonderful reminder of how full of life she was in the small number of days she had. But really, there isn’t much we wouldn’t do to have her back again.

Meanwhile, there has been a small break in the oppressive Texas heat this last week. You can see it in the sheep, whose mobility and personalities have expanded as the temperatures have declined. Their curiosity about their surroundings now appears to include more than just the grass that they eat.  And — perhaps the best indicator of cooler times ahead — young Calvin, the youngest of the Gang of 5, is starting to get a little… randy. Just the other day, he made a fumbling pass at one of the ewes, who deftly turned the young ram away. Still, it lifted our hearts a little in the aftermath of Francie’s demise to see the first nascent signs of The Circle starting over yet again.

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Fences and Francie

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

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We moved to the country to have space to think and breathe and especially to have the privacy to live our lives. What we got was 100 times more land than we have had before. For some reason, that’s just not enough for the Dog. Francie is a young Great Pyrenees pup with a gleam in her eye and wanderlust in her soul. Although we bought her and her twin sister Freckles to keep an eye out for predators endangering the sheep, she’s spent more of her time with an eye on the outside world. She’s an escape artist. No barrier that we contrive is up to the task of keeping her on our side of the fence.

Her jail breaks are an incremental process. First, she finds a way out. We put her back and watch carefully for the next scheduled escape, about 3 minutes later. Once we observe her M.O., we move in with enough planks and ropes and wire to secure the border with Mexico. Sometimes, that buys a night of peace. Just as often, Francie regards it as a dare to find a new point of egress.

The other night, she found the presence of a horse in the next field over (about a quarter mile away) to be highly offensive. She wormed her way out of our field and spent the next hour or so barking at the horse. A few planks and ropes and wire later, she was back in. Twenty-four hours later, she was out the entire evening. This time, she sprung her sister as well. When we awoke at 7, the two of them were camped out on the back patio. Argh!

My sense is that Francie’s wandering time is nearly at an end. Yesterday, she escaped by jumping over a fence. But when she decided to return via the same path, she snagged herself on the fence and was briefly dangling upside down, her leg caught on the wiring. This opened up a gash on her leg, which led to a visit to the vet. More importantly, it got us thinking seriously about building an escape-proof kennel and run.

It’s ironic that the more Francie enjoys the very qualities that brought us to the country in the first place, the more restrictions we place on her. Perhaps as she matures, she’ll mellow and learn to appreciate the finer points of our own pasture, rather than harassing livestock on adjoining properties. As we sat on the patio last night after dinner and looked out over the field on a rare cool evening in rural Texas, it was hard for us to imagine wanting to wander anywhere else.

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