Monthly Archives: May 2013

Lambing Season 2013 or how I started the vet’s retirement fund

When I say that I have miscellaneous sheep, I mean it. My tiny 12 sheep flock represents 5 breeds – Cheviot, Romney, Finn, Katahdin and Polypas in various mixtures. If I were to follow the recent trend in dog shelter identification we could call my flock “All American” sheep. Since I started my sheep owning adventure purely with the idea of herding practice with my dog Rose, the collection was not about breeding. And by luck I ended up with a lovely  Finn ram. This year, I had six pregnant ewes.

The excitement began on April Fool’s day when the ewe I have had the longest looked at me while heartily consuming hay as if to say “nothing here to see” shortly before I left for a dog training class. Just two hours later, I returned to find a dried off happy healthy ram lamb. Thank you Aster. The next day, Bethany produced a ram lamb… The following week, Sue watched me as I left for a quick trip to Belmont to return the goats to their summer grazing. I knew in that instant I closed the gate behind me that she was going to give birth while I was gone. Yep, a ram lamb…

3 ram lambs and counting…

For those of you who don’t know much about livestock farming, when you are first starting out trying to build numbers in your flock, you want female offspring. Think about it, you can get away with one ram or bull or buck, as long as you have a few ewes or cows or does.  A bunch of males and one female just can’t get you too far in a single year.

So, I am feeling a little discouraged. But I shouldn’t have. In retrospect, things look great when you have had three problem free births and the biggest disappointment is that you have ram lambs.

The next night I was up all night with the single pregnant goat. Something is wrong. It is not hard labor but it has gone on too long and then it stops. This is not good. And while I have been around several problem free births, I am not really keen on learning things at the expense of life itself. So, I call the vet in the morning, load the goat in the truck and have her examined. Vet says “if she doesn’t go by 3:30 pm, we will do a C-section”… Not good. There is definitely something wrong. A good friend of mine comes by. And as we are talking, the goat suddenly screams. Finally she is in labor (goats by the way are incredibly noisy in labor unlike sheep who have much less to say about it). First kid out is deformed and dead and has been the cause of a traffic jam that has threatened the lives of the others. I decide that pride cometh before the fall and call the vet. She comes out and gets there as I am pulling out dead kid #3. I think that we must be done but the vet sticks her hand in there and scoops out  the only live kid – Kid Kudzu. She is one spunky girl.

Money to the vet.

In the meantime, I am worrying over one of the other sheep, who is now nicknamed “Ms. Potential Prolapse”. She is overdue. But first there is a distraction from lambing. One of the not-pregnant sheep out in the field slashes her shoulder open. It is a large wound, a little bit beyond a bandaid (not that you can bandaid sheep) and antibiotic cream. So, I call the vet again… This time the other partner comes out with a visiting vet from Egypt. He isn’t so keen on entering the field with the llama. He is quite used to spitting camels. But Joe greets them nicely. The vet sews up the sheep and then suggests that Joe’s toes are a bit long. I have had trouble trimming them – so I let the vet show me his technique. Joe has freshly trimmed toes even though he isn’t a very happy camper. Later that evening, Joe was still in a “mood” and spit at me for the first time. I can’t say that it was entirely unjustified from his point of view. First strangers mess with one of his sheep (he was clearly distressed by it) and then they attack his feet!

More money…

And then on Monday early morning, Poppy delivers, you guessed it… A RAM lamb. Then she develops early mastitis. Another call to the vet, for advice and antibiotic.

4 ram lambs and counting.

More money…but at least no farm call

I am still watching Ms. Potential Prolapse who is now significantly overdue, looking more and more like a dairy barn every day (complete with built-in udder). And she prolapses Wednesday morning. There is a thing called a prolapse retainer that you can stick into the sheep’s vagina to hold everything in place until the birth. I feel pretty unsure at this point  and I am concerned that she is now beyond any reasonable range of her due date. So, I call the vet… If this were the old days when you didn’t store phone numbers in your phone I would have the vet’s number memorized by now.

In addition to help with the insertion of the prolapse retainer (wow, now I know I could have done that on my own!) the vet gives the ewe labor inducing drugs… Yeah, in less than 48 hours it will all be over… NOT. Friday morning comes and after two nights of checking regularly at 2-3 hour intervals, a C-section seems in order. I call a friend to help me get this house of a sheep into the truck to take to the vet. Fortunately, I have an amazing number of friends who will do crazy things when requested. I don’t know if my friends facilitate my insanity or keep me from going over the edge.

Of course, this is THE Friday morning when every law enforcement officer in Eastern Massachusetts has descended on Watertown, MA and my husband is trying to get to the airport after dropping the dog at a friend’s house.

So there I am, watching the C-section while concerned relatives are calling to make sure we are okay. I can’t exactly ignore their calls when there are terrorists running amok. So my phone conversations go something like this. “Hi, we are fine. Al’s at the airport in Boston, I am in New Hampshire and I am in the vet’s office with my sheep who is having a C-section. Gotta go wipe a lamb off”. I don’t think my step-mother quite caught anything except  “we are fine” . This time there is a happy ending: a happy healthy ewe lamb. And a happy healthy ram lamb. They are gorgeous twins who almost made it to being full grown without ever leaving the comfort of the womb.

More money…

The count: 5 ram lambs, 1 ewe lamb.

LambAnd finally this past Sunday, without fanfare or drama, Annie, my mixed up part hair/part wool sheep, gave birth to her little ewe lamb. And lambing season is done.

 

 

The final count: 5 rams, 2 ewe lambs and a silly doeling (girl kid).

Livestock vets get paid poorly for their services. Farmers just can’t afford big vet bills and still make money. They can hardly make money anyway even in a perfect season without problems. I wasn’t planning on making money this season but I didn’t expect that I would write so many checks to the vet that I would use up the check book.

At some point, I made the decision that it was important to use this odd collection of unrelated birthing incidents as learning experiences that would aid my independence in the future rather than trying to go it alone. Now I am wondering if I could get a student loan to pay the vet bill.

 

How the heck did I get here?

“But life don’t clickety clack down a straight line track. It comes together and it comes apart.” Ferron

If, at twenty, you had told me that I would ever be a community organizer/lobbyist in what was the seventh poorest city in the country, I would have laughed at you (such that my serious self in those days could laugh). In my head, I imagined myself on a farm on a hillside with two border collies.  But instead I was determined to save the world (or at least a small corner if it) and I spent my twenties in New Haven, CT working for a homeless shelter, lobbying in the Connecticut legislature, teaching social welfare policy and community organizing to undergraduates at a small liberal arts college.

If, at thirty, you told me that I would do computer programming and work on one of the seminal digital libraries and teach library students about technology, I would have laughed. But I spent my thirties, doing just that.

If, at forty, you had told me I would become a dog trainer, work in animal shelters and throw off any semblance of an academic life, I would have laughed. But, one day in 2003, we decided to adopt a second dog, I became a volunteer at the local shelter and suddenly I was on a path, not a straight line track, more like a cow path in Boston, but a path…

Getting the idea?

If, at fifty, you told me that I would be sitting on a farm with 12 sheep, 7 lambs, 4 dogs, a llama, a cat and part-time goats, I just might have believed you (except for the llama… he came out of nowhere) though I wouldn’t have had a clue how I might get there. Because, Magic, the adopted dog led to Quinn, the rescue border collie, who led sheep herding who led to Rose, another rescue Border Collie, who led to owning sheep and goats on borrowed land which led to that farm on the hillside that I mentioned in the first paragraph.

If you diagnosed me with adult ADHD, I wouldn’t be surprised. Thank goodness I picked up a sense of humor along the way. Otherwise life wouldn’t be half as fun. And the manure pile might overwhelm me. It still might overwhelm me but I will go down laughing.