Welcome to The Chronicles. I hope you will enjoy my posts about the joys of raising the oldest breed of sheep in the world -- the always intriguing, easy-to-raise Soay sheep. With few exceptions, posts contain what I hope is useful information interspersed with a bit of whimsy. Feel free to comment on anything you find here. If you want to send me a private message, that's okay, too. Send your note to the address on the "contact us" page of our main website (***saltmarshranch-dot-com). Meanwhile, enjoy The Soay Sheep Chronicles! Priscilla
February 2014 update: Dalton no longer sells Supersmall ear tags, alas! We have had such excellent experience with Supersmalls that we put in one final big order from their warehouse stock, enough to last us for several years. If you have used Supersmalls in the past and need more, you might check with Dalton to […]
Answer? Yes. End of post? Not quite. In the world of pedigrees and registrations, identification is everything. Paperwork listing a Soay sheep’s name and parentage is a great start and required for registration, but in the final analysis, ear tags (or tatoos or imbedded chips) are the only way to positively identify an animal, by […]
Ever since we got our first Soay sheep nearly seven years ago, we have bragged to our friends, and frequently boasted online as well, about how great they are for cleaning up neglected pastures and keeping grass pastures healthy. Everything we learned online in the early days reinforced our notion that our sheep were in […]
Does one of your sheep have a cloudy, bluish-looking eye, what you might call a “walleyed” look? Is the animal behaving as if it might not be able to see well or is bumping into things? If so, it probably has scratched its eyeball or gotten poked in the eye and injured its cornea. There […]
It’s that time of year again, with breeding almost over but lambing still in the distant future, when Soay shepherds start looking through catalogs and scouring the web for holiday gifts for their animals. I have two suggestions this year, both of them bargains and far easier than making Christmas stockings disguised as feed bags […]
Not much changes from year to year in the lore about hoof trimming for sheep and other cloven-footed animals: use sharp clippers, trim a little at a time so you do not cut through the “quick,” try to create a platform for each hoof so the animal can walk without a hitch in its step. […]