Jugging

the ritual of getting newborns & their moms into a quiet, private place

Lamb Camp Day 2: It’s all about the lambs and how to “work” and enjoy them

Lamb Camp Day 2: It’s all about the lambs and how to “work” and enjoy them

For those of you who landed on this post looking for how to “work” a newborn lamb, or how a Soay ewe manages to nurse her first twin while the second one is coming out the birth canal and greeting the world, let me reassure you that you have not landed in an alien universe. […]

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Real-life Soay lambing stories: jugging sure beats bottle feeding bummer lambs

Real-life Soay lambing stories: jugging sure beats bottle feeding bummer lambs

Apart from lambing itself, the best part of raising Soay sheep is communicating about them with other breeders, folks interested in starting a flock, researchers looking for various kinds of data, the anonymous readers of our website and this blog, and especially anyone with questions about lambing issues. Most of the time the questions come […]

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Jugs – they’re not just for Soay lambing any more

Jugs – they’re not just for Soay lambing any more

Veteran readers of this blog know what firm believers we are in using jugs to house our Soay ewes with their newborn lambs. The first couple of years we made jugs from our Shaul panels and that was nice, but the lambs sometimes crawled through and wandered off. So Steve and Shawn designed wood-sided jugs […]

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Bedding for Soay lambs

Bedding for Soay lambs

With lambing fast upon us, we are reminded of a lively conversation on one of the Soay “chatlists” some time ago about what kind of bedding to put in the jugs, the lambing stalls, or whatever enclosed shelter areas are designated for lambing. Here’s one topic that is really easy to deal with, but worth […]

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Jugging revisited

Jugging revisited

A number of regular and usually supportive readers, including my brother Jim, have expressed skepticism here and elsewhere about the notion of “jugging” described in an earlier post, and where it fits in the greater scheme of things in our Soay sheep world.  One observer questioned the very existence of jugging, suggesting in polite tones that perhaps I made […]

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Jugging with your blue gloves on

When I looked at the first draft of this post I nearly cancelled the whole blog in despair.  Nitrile gloves — now there’s a headline grabber.  If I did not lose you to generalized boredom, I was sure to lose you to a bad case of MEGO. Then I remembered the “dance” I describe here, the task where the […]

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