The Soay Sheep Chronicles

Perhaps the greatest initial investment a Soay keeper needs make is decent fencing to keep the little darlings home and safe.  Alas, the aesthetics of a run of taught, newly-installed wire fence fastened neatly to precisely aligned, precisely vertical fence posts is of no concern to the rams, especially during rut.  They bash away without shame when they are trying to court the ladies on the other side of the fence.  Let it be said, in fairness to the rams, that ewes also engage in this most unattractive behavior, with more persistence if less power.  Ordinarily they do not actually broach the fence, but clips come loose, unsightly bulges develop, and the bottom of the fence raises up to the point that stupid lambs will get their necks caught reaching underneath.  All most annoying to an otherwise agreeable shepherd.

Consider the options.  You can sell the sheep and take up some other hobby.  Or you can always just eat them.  Less drastic, if expensive and back-breaking, you can replace the trashed fence entirely with a stout board fence of 2-by-8’s bolted to railroad sleepers.  Better yet, make use of the fact that a sheep will not bash what he, or she, cannot see.  That is, provide a View Block.

A View Block is just that – something, anything that keeps a sheep on one side of your fence from seeing, and trying to get at, what is on the other.  There are any number of strategies.  A friend of ours came by a great stack of used plywood sheets some years ago.  Every autumn she lugs the whole lot to the fences separating her various breeding groups and ties the pieces together end on end with scraps of baling twine from last year’s hay bales.  Economical to be sure, but only if you have a source of free plywood and a strong back you are willing to sacrifice to the cause. 

Last year about this time, just as the rams were gearing up for their annual testosterone-driven display of head-butting, we stumbled on a less strenuous and for us more practical alternative.  Steve was out one day laying black landscape cloth along one of our fences to keep grass and weeds from shorting out the electric “scare” wire.  A gust of wind blew a loose flap of the cloth up against the fence, blocking our view.  Eureka!  If it blocked our view, it also would block the animals’ view. 

For readers not familiar with this stuff called “landscape cloth,” here is a modest description.  It is generally black, somewhat the texture of thin felt except made from a woven synthetic fabric, water permeable, UV-resistant so it lasts a long time, and mechanically strong so it does not stretch – all desirable characteristics.  At our farm store it comes in 3, 4, 6, and 12-foot widths, the 4-foot size being just right for our fences.  It is sold in 100 or 200 meter rolls (go figure).  Landscape cloth usually goes under a gravel lane or walkway to keep weeds from growing up through the rocks, or under the mulch layers of flower beds much tidier than the ones found on our farm.  (We like to think of its new use as keeping our ram or ewe “weeds” from getting through the cloth to the other pasture.).

Steve folds the cloth over the top of the fence, leaving a 4-inch flap (somewhat akin to a selvage if you’re a tailor or seamstress) on the other side, and secures it with cable ties, the doodads electricians use for bundling wires.   Here’s a picture of one of our View Blocks with the flap folded over and held down by cable ties. 

Any scraps of wire or twine also will do to secure the cloth.  Using a 10-penny nail to poke a hole through the main sheet of cloth and the flap, as close to the top wire as possible to provide a snug closure, we zip up a cable tie every 2 feet or so across the top length of fence.  The goal is to keep the cloth flat against the fence and tightened down so the wind cannot allow any flapping or billowing pieces to get started and eventually tear off.  Here’s a closeup of the cable tie securely anchored.
 

Our first fence outfitted this way was equipped with a stout flat board – a batter board actually – about 15 inches above the ground that we originally installed against the actions of a particularly determined ram.  After securing the top edge of the cloth with cable ties, Steve simply nailed the bottom edge of the cloth to the board with wide-headed roofing nails.  Although we fretted the winds would pull the cloth through the nails, we got through breeding season last year with no mangled fences and nary an attempt at bashing through the cloth. It has been nearly a year and so far the View Blocks are intact and ready for another rut, which is fast upon us.   Here is the full expanse of our most needed View Block from last year.  It kept Warwick, who had been favored with over 20 ewes in his own pasture, from bashing through to get at the additional ten or so ewes who were being courted by Jerry on the other side of the fence.  Good grief.

In the Soay world at least, good fences do indeed make good neighbors.  Warwick and Jerry finished their appointed tasks without a single dustup, and who knows whether the splendid bunch of really good-looking lambs that ensued was thanks in part to the fact that their daddies were not distracted by the possibilities just beyond the fence.      

The other method we tried came about when Steve noticed a pair of ornery ewes, known troublemakers, deep into an extended dispute back and forth along a 150-foot fence, making a mess of the whole length of it.  Indifferent to the source or explanation of such unappealing female behavior, Steve quickly threw up a cloth View Block.  This fence was not fitted with battering boards, so he used cable ties both top and bottom.  It worked for awhile, until the ewes were moved to another location.  But over the winter, the bottom edge of the cloth tore loose, creating an undulating but ineffective length of fluttering black cloth still attached at the fence top.  Here it is in all its useless glory.

The Engineering Department is at work on a solution.

As for our friend the plywood queen, we are pleased to report she has become a landscape cloth convert.  She reports that poultry wire clips also work quite nicely to hold the cloth to the fence.

Here’s [not] looking at you, kid.

For now …

When you are putting together your Soay flock business plan, remember you do not need to include haircuts and perms in the expense column.  For the most part, Soay will shed their fleece without your help.  But you do need to pay for someone to trim your animals’ hooves or, better yet, learn how to do it yourself.

If you have kept up with your reading here, you already know about the Sheep Chair we use at the Saltmarsh Beauty Parlor.  So now the ram or ewe is strapped in and ready.  You lift up the first hoof, only to be greeted by an irregular-shaped black thing that looks like a partly-melted piece of black plastic embedded with hay shards and grass bits and suffused with the ubiquitous sheep poop.  Gaak!  Where to begin?  What to do?

Off-hand, I cannot think of anything related to Soay husbandry that depends more on trial and error, or benefits more from a little practice, than hoof-trimming.  Unless your animals are on gravel 24/7 year-round, their hooves really must be trimmed or the animals will go lame or get impacted or infected hooves.  At a minimum, they will be uncomfortable.  There is good news on two fronts:  the learning curve is steep and fast, and you can find quite a few well-illustrated guides in the sheep literature.  Our current favorite, including photos, is at www.fiascofarm.com.  Let me just briefly introduce you to trimming and then send you off to the experts.  Here is Steve as he starts one hoof:

No two hooves are alike, so I cannot give you a formula or a rule based on inches or centimeters about what to cut off.  But the goals are always the same.  First, try to end up with the bottom of the hoof flat and the two halves trimmed so that together they form a nice flat platform for the sheep to stand on.  We do not want our sheep listing off to one side or favoring one leg over another because of grossly uneven hooves.  Remember run-down heels in the bad old days of high-heeled women’s city shoes?  Ouch!  We want to avoid the ovine equivalent of that curse.

Second, try to leave no flaps of horny material on the sides, or an overly thick heel pad, to get impacted or sore.  If you achieve either of these goals, you usually will have achieved the other one, too. 

In the next picture, Steve takes off a protruding edge.  On some animals, the “heel” portion also will have grown too thick and must be trimmed off.  The flaps are easy to spot; judging the thickness of the heel really does take practice, so err on the side of taking less off at first.

Here is a close-up to show you how a small trimmer operates with more finesse than the bigger pair designed for Suffolks and other hulks.

In the next picture, Steve works on the edge closest to him and the fresh edge looks shiny, appearing almost white with the sun glinting off the new surface.  Notice the surface of that part of the hoof is now more or less level, with no offending flaps.

The last photo shows a pair of hooves with all edges and the heel pads in need of trimming.  Steve has taken off some of the edges on the animal’s right hoof (on your left, of course), where it is shiny, but there is more work to be done.  The hooves are not so overgrown as to cause limping at this point, but another year of growth without trimming probably would cause problems.

Just as your pedicurist needs to judge how much cuticle or heel callus to trim off, my resident Soay pedicurist (Mr. Steven to his valued customers) needed to learn how far to trim without drawing blood.  He still misses sometimes, and the sheep register their displeasure by sauntering right past the “tips” jar without breaking stride or even turning their heads. 

Maybe next year we will experiment with the latest shades of hoof polish or even massages, but for now …

Let’s face it, all you shepherds and shepherdesses over the age of 40.  If we are not smart about how we handle our animals, we put our backs at risk  – never mind lifting hay bales, building fence, and breaking up ice in the water tanks in January.  The last thing we need is to use brute force to work our adult Soay when mechanical help is at hand.

Enter the Sheep Chair:

As its name implies, the Chair upends the sheep and can eliminate flailing, butting, and horn pokes, the other unpleasant surprises our animals occasionally throw at us.  It’s our own fault; we chose to raise primitive sheep, after all.  The Sheep Chair is just the right level of domestication, and you do not even need to dig out your grandmother’s antimacassars.  The first time you read through this description, you may scoff at the notion of using something that in words seems too complicated to bother with.  That’s okay, but tag this posting in your favorites list and come back to it after you have trimmed several adult rams’ hooves hunched over in the sheep poop and you have put your chiropractor’s phone number on speed dial.

We use the Chair for our Soay like this:  Steve gets a ram by the horns, quietly if possible, with both their backs aimed at the Chair, lifts just enough to take the weight off the ram’s front hooves, then gently pulls back until the lower bar of the Chair clips the ram’s back legs and plops him into the Chair.  Now I know where the phrase “with his butt in a sling” comes from.

Here is one of our biggest rams just after landing in the Chair:

I am authorized to report that, while the ram is rendered mostly immobile, his most useful body parts are neither squished nor compromised for future use.

As far as we know, none of the sheep equipment suppliers offer Soay-sized Chairs.  They are all sized for Suffolks and other sheep giants.  So we were not surprised the first time we used our Chair when the Soay’s rump sank way down and he was able to wallow and flail and create an unholy mess of his horns and legs all tangled up in the webbing.  I was laughing too hard to take a picture, sorry.  Think small rhino in a tropical hammock, or some such thing.

Time for a customized retrofit.  The easy first step was to narrow the width of the Chair until it was tight enough to prevent the animal from rolling side to side like the Titanic.  Next, we gradually made the “sling,” or webbed seat part of the Chair, less deep so the sheep would not slip down too far into the netting.  Whoever makes these Chairs does quite a lovely job of lacing the netting to the frame.  Steve chose not to mess with this workmanship and instead cinched up the netting a little at a time with zip ties. 

Once the ram had settled in with his reading material from among the old issues of Sports Illustrated and Business Week, Steve could get up close for the pedicure without either lying prone in sheep poop or putting his face at risk of a swift kick from a wayward hoof.

Our first year using the Chair, my job was to keep my hand on the ram’s chest to be sure he did not suddenly lunge forward out of the Chair if we did not have the seat cinched up shallow enough, but this year my desire to record for this posting how Steve uses the Chair led us to make two improvements.

First, the belt.  No, no, we are not engaging in corporal punishment, merely using a material at hand for an SPCA-approved restraint.  Looping a wide belt through the side of the frames and then around the ram’s chest (both loops of the belt in front, not behind the sheep) and putting the belt either above the front legs or right below them, keeps his body quiet (in the photo above, Steve has not yet latched the belt).  Either way is a big help, and you might try using two belts if you have a ram (or ewe, for that matter) with serious attitude. 

So far, so good, but even with the belt, the ram was free to flail his head, and his prodigious horns, again risking both Steve’s face and the aluminum chair tubing.  Enter the blindfold.  We had read somewhere that throwing a blanket over an animal’s face was a good all-species home remedy for butting, flailing, bolting (horses) or even spraying (skunks).  Out came the ever–present white Costco golf towel from the Kit.

Here is the mighty Atlas, one of the biggest Soay in North America, quietly at ease in the Chair with both his seat belt and his sleep mask on, waiting for his hoof trim.

One final note.  I did spell the long word in the second paragraph correctly and yes it does mean those little doily doodads strategically placed where the Mr.’s head rests on the back of the overstuffed recliner and his weary hands come in contact with the arms of the Chair.  I’m not sure you can use the word in a Scrabble game, but at least you know what to ask for in your local general store to to keep the essence of Soay in your hair from becoming embedded in the upholstery.   

For now …

Once we are past lambing and the pumps are in the river, ready to start irrigating the pastures, we turn our attention to the Bull Pen.  Other than occasional wormings, putting hay in their feeders in the winter, and for the lucky few, fall action, the rams are pretty much on their own year-round.  Their Annual Physical in June usually is the only time we get a good look at each of them up close. 

Regular readers already familiar with our fixation on routines and data will not be surprised to learn we have both an Adult Kit and an Annual Physical Check List, same list and kit for ewes and rams, mostly.

From a distance, the lamb and adult kits also look pretty much the same:  green rectangular box that sits on the fence, towels, syringes.  But there the similarity ends.  Here is our Adult Kit spread out on the workbench for loading.

In clockwise order, starting with the white bottle in the upper left corner:

Valbazen.  One of two wormers we use, switching from time to time to minimize the buildup of immunity in the resident worm population.  Whether or not you need to worm, and how often, is up to you and your vet to decide.  We take a composite stool sample in once a year to see what we are up against and go from there.   

Cooler.  Because we vaccinate when the outdoor temperatures are well above 40 degrees and it sometimes takes a long time before we inject, we need to keep the Covexin-8 cold.  While Steve gets the rams (or ewes) rounded up, I load a syringe for each animal with 2 cc of Covexin (the dosage listed on the bottle is way too much for little Soay sheep) and place them in a small beer cooler with a few ice cubes, leaving the big bottle of Covexin behind in the refrigerator while we work the sheep.  You can use fake ice packs, but if you are doing a lot of sheep, the Covexin-loaded syringes will start to freeze.  Since the syringes can be purchased very inexpensively in bulk from Jeffers, pre-filling one for each animal prevents degradation or contamination of the large (expensive) bottle of vaccine and also helps prevent the direct transfer of disease organisms between animals from re-using needles.  It took Steve awhile to recalibrate from the squeaky clean, sterile lab environment he was used to when he was a bench scientist to the realities of a barnyard, but he still cannot stand re-using a syringe when it costs only a dime. You can see the syringes laid out here for filling, with the actual vaccine bottle to the left.

Marking pens.  Right there below the cooler are two paint sticks, one to indicate Covexin has been administered and one that worming was done.  Many of the pictures of our animals on our farm website and the OFP Gallery show faces with green or yellow or blue or pink stripes, signifying nothing more earth-shaking than that I took the pictures while we had the sheep confined for their physicals.

Clipboard.  Holds the ever-present list, discussed below.

Rags and towels.  Until recently, we used them only for cleanup.  But they also make good blindfolds as I will tell you about in a separate post.  This thing is getting too long already.

Hoof trimmers.  As you can see, I loaded up both the big white trimmer and the smaller red one over on the left.  Turns out Steve never uses the big one because he learned the smaller one allows him to get into smaller flaps of overgrowth with less risk of cutting too deep.  If you own the big hulks like Suffolk sheep, the larger trimmer will work just fine.  More on hoof trimming in a separate post as well. 

Wormer applicator.  I did not organize the contents very well, did I?  Way over on the lower left is the last component of the Adult Kit, a clear plastic “syringe” with a grey open-tube applicator.  An easily-washed gadget, it is sold by Premier as a “drencher.”  You also can easily make your own drenchers by taking the needle off a syringe and replacing it with a short piece of clear plastic tubing.  We keep several in different sizes on hand for things like a quick shot of Pepto Bismol for diarrhea.  I forgot to include in this picture a short plastic disposable (highball?) glass I use to pour out enough wormer for several animals.  Taking this extra step means I do not put the dirty applicator back into the sterile bottle of wormer for re-filling.  And besides, I have not figured out how to get the applicator down into the big bottle without smudging the icky worming solution all over my hands.  Fussy?  You bet. 

The working list.  We just cannot say enough about the value of having a list to work from.  A plain name list with tag numbers will do, but boredom will set in quickly.  Because Steve keeps detailed data on each of our Soay, it is just as easy for him to print out birthdates and parents along with tag numbers.

For us, one of the most quietly satisfying, oftentimes humorous parts of shepherding is simply talking about our animals and how they look and act while we are working them.  We almost always end up with a number of questions and data treasure hunts to go on.  Especially with our rams, the Annual Physical is the best time to observe, discuss, and record growth changes and the appearance (or not) of family resemblances.  This time, for example, we noted that Antony’s horns have grown to magnificent arches, very wide as are his sire Chestnut’s horns, but with less ribbing.   At one year, Antony had okay horns, but his second year of growth must have been unusually robust or we simply were not paying attention while he grew his rack.  He also has taken on the graceful body contours of his dam, Galadrial.  I think it is time to brag on this fellow, so I am going to take you through his baby album.  Here he is as a cute newborn with his twin Cleopatra and his dam.  Antony’s on the right.

As a youngster, he was nice looking but nothing you would enter in a GQ contest.  Again, he is with his twin and he is on the right.

At about one year, he was starting to get respectable horns and the same little white beard as his sire.  I took this picture one day when all our rams were snoozing and I was able to walk among them without disturbing their naps. 

Finally, here is a picture of Antony in all his horned glory, taken this spring while we were working the rams, fresh from rooing off his winter coat and looking mighty sleek. 

Seeing Antony up close and marveling at his looks sent us right back to his pedigree to see if we can get more like him – ewes or rams!  Turns out there are reasons beyond compulsion with data to spend time out with these elegant sheep.

For now …