adult issues, including how and when to trim
Over a decade ago I posted about the pros and cons of castrating some of your Soay rams: in a nutshell, no worries about accidental breeding, more mellow fellows in the fields, more flexibility in butchering, and having a companion for non-breeding rams left behind or injured rams or ewes, versus losing the statuesque horns […]
Of the hundreds of questions we’ve been asked over the last 13 years of raising heritage sheep, none is as vexing as “How will I know whether I need to trim a ram’s horns and do I really need to trim his horns?” It’s a rare issue, but when it arises, it matters. A horn […]
As I have said before on these pages (I think), when it comes to deciding which rams to breed, Soay owners engaged in conservation breeding face a dilemma: whether to breed rams with tight horns, including horns that have been cut. If we do not breed these rams, either because we do not like their […]
It’s been a quiet week at Saltmarsh Ranch, at least compared to the recent weeks of frantic downsizing. Temperatures have fallen to normal autumn levels and the fire danger level was reduced from “extreme” to “high,” still scary but a whole lot better than it was all summer. The sheep are making one more pass […]
Nothing beats luck when it comes to using photos to make a point about raising Soay sheep, or anything else for that matter. Let me explain. A few weeks ago when I was putting together the update about annual ram horn growth, I stumbled across pictures of our ram Hesket taken in 2013, about a […]
Every year at the winter solstice, usually December 21st, sheep horns (and for that matter all heritage sheep and other mammals’ horns as far as I have been able to determine) begin growing, a process that lasts for about three months and then tapers off through the spring and stops until the next December. To […]