The Mopple Chronicles

We're Baa-ack!

2011-06-23T12:39:00.024-05:00

It's been well over a year since I posted an entry to Mopple's blog. Mostly because I stopped working with him but I plan to start again, so here we are.

Sheep (and goats), you see, are wired to follow, not lead, so it's hard for them to understand walking in front of a person as in driving. It takes an intelligent pupil to pull that off . And, while Mopple is possibly world's sweetest sheep, he's not the brightest bulb in the pack, so I don't think he'll make a driving sheep. Our new goal is for him to pull the wagon while I walk along at his side.

I might also begin working with one of my woolly wethers. One, a 3-year-old black Classic/Miniature Cheviot wether called Baart, is an in-your-pocket sheep and unusually bold and smart, so although he isn't very big, he's a logical choice.

Stay tuned!

Meet Fosco (he's brand new)

2010-04-05T21:50:00.009-05:00

Shebaa lambed this morning and the trick’s on us. Instead of giving birth to her usual set of lovely twins, she presented me (after a long delivery at that) with one jumbo-size white ram lamb (that's him above, thinking, "Is that what I'm looking for?"). He’s very nice and his mama loves him dearly but I had my heart set on a ewe lamb to keep for my flock. Oh well.

The new guy delivered hind feet first and is so huge that he got stuck, so I had to assist by gently pulling him.

He’s a little slow (his umbilical was compressed against his mom’s pelvis during birth) but he’ll grow out of it. I named him Fosco after the Guinness-drinking ram who won the Smartest Sheep in Glennkill contest in Leonie Swann's charming mystery book starring sheep, Three Bags Full. It'll give him something to aspire to.

John suggested that if we don’t sell him as a lamb we might keep him since he’s out of one of my best producers, has unique grey markings on his legs, and I don’t have a white ram of my own. We'll see.

(Getting back to) Taking care of business.

2010-04-04T13:14:00.007-05:00

I’m back to blogging after a long hiatus. I’ve been awfully busy this winter and the old ones’ deaths took the wind out of my sails. Today would have been Baasha’s 14th birthday. I really miss that sweet old girl.

However, yesterday I put Mopple on a lead and discovered he’s forgotten quite a bit since last fall, so now I’m chomping at the bit to get him back on track. I find he’s doing better wearing a halter than a collar and fortunately the alpaca halter I keep for my Classic/Miniature Cheviots fits him to a tee.

On the sheepy front, two of my ewes are fit to burst with lambs. I expect the older ewe, Shebaa (Wolf Moon Findabar; pictured near the top of this entry), to lamb within 24 hours because she’s all hollowed out and her udder is fairly bursting.

The other ewe, Wren (Wolf Moon Wren, pictured in profile) is due on the 10th. Both are bred to Maxx (Wolf Moon Fin Bheara), our young, spotted ram. The lambs will be his first offspring, so I’m really looking forward to their arrival. They are 3/4 sisters, both out of old Rebaa (Coats' High Ridge Farm's Rosy Lolita), so they are Baasha's grand-daughters. Maxx's mom is Wolf Moon Baatiste, so Baasha is his maternal grand-dam too.

Let there be lambs!

The Last Farewell

2010-01-26T19:10:00.012-06:00

I’ve blogged about this at Inside Storey and (as Martok) at Mondays With Martok (http://www.hobbyfarms.com/hobby-farms-editorial-blogs/sue-weaver/absent-friends.aspx), but I have to tell it one more time. On Wednesday, January 20, 2010, Baasha and Dodger departed together for sheep heaven.

We knew Baasha’s time was near but Dodger went down very quickly and unexpectedly, so having him put down came as a shock. I miss them both dreadfully but Dodger couldn’t get up by himself any longer and Baasha was so painfully crippled by arthritis.

I invite you to visit Baasha’s memorial page at my Dreamgoat Annie Web site (www.dreamgoatannie.com/BaashaMemorial.html). I’ll put up a similar page for Dodger (pictured at the left) but have to retrieve more photos from my dinosaur Mac before I can make one and my trusty old Mac isn’t set up right now.

Good-bye old friends—you are sorely missed.

Baamadeus' turn at bat

2010-01-16T17:56:00.004-06:00

We trimmed the rams' hooves today and then left them in the yard for the morning. When they congregated by the main sheep fold, it quickly became obvious that Baannie is in heat. After the guys went in and the ewes came out, she hung out by New Ramsgate, so I decided to breed her to Baama.

Baama is Wolf Moon Baamadeus, my youngest and yet-unproven ram. He is Baasha’s love lambie conceived by her son, Rumbler, through the fence, and what a fortuitous whoops! lamb he is. He’s of moderate height but built like a bull, low and massive, with a strongly arched profile, huge eyes and teensy ears. When he was about 10 days old, something injured his right ear and it filled with fluid that resisted draining. It eventually deflated but left him with a cauliflower ear that gives him a roguish air.

Baannie (Wolf Moon Macha) is one of my oldest and best-producing ewes and also a Baasha daughter, so we’ll be inbreeding to Baasha with this mating. We’ve done this before (we’re setting type for the Classic Cheviot breed) but not this close, so it should be an interesting breeding—hopefully resulting in ewe lambs I can keep, as I’ve sold all of Baannie’s daughters and regretted it!

So now they are in the breeding pen. She coos and wiggles her tail and he sniffs and grunts, making noises (I swear) like Tim the Tool Man. Since all the other rams leap on and breed the ewes about 500 times the first hour, I am wondering about the boy. He is slow. He did jump her several times while I watched them, so if his aim is good, we’re in free and looking at mid-June lambs.

If you’re short of trouble…

2010-01-13T18:59:00.008-06:00

I collect sayings and proverbs about sheep and goats and a Finnish favorite is, “If you’re short of trouble, take a goat.” As a goat obsessive I don’t necessarily agree with that sentiment but it’s true that keeping animals, especially much-loved animals, is sure to bring some heartache to your door. I’m presently dealing with having my favorite old ewe put down soon, another ewe with a persistently abscessed hoof, and of all things—a goat whose teeth are falling out!

The lame ewe is Rebaa (pictured above) who has been hopping around on three legs for many weeks. We’ve tried ichthammol and Epsom salts gel poultices; soaking in warm Epsom salts water (I’m still doing that every day); and now, homeopathic remedies. It’s better but still has a long way to go. We’ve used booties designed for dogs (now appropriately referred to as Rebaaks) to hold the poultices against her bandaged hoof and coronary band. She is not amused (and it’s surprising how fast an elderly, three-legged sheep can run) but since she’s tame, this hasn’t been too terribly hard to do.

Then, day before yesterday it occurred to me that Bon Bon has been ‘smiling’ quite a lot these past few weeks. She does that, pulls her upper lip back to expose her teeth, but… Imagine my surprise and considerable horror when I opened her mouth and found that her front teeth are loose and falling out! For those who don’t know this, goats (and other ruminants like sheep, cattle, deer and the like) have lower incisors that meet a hard dental palate rather than upper teeth. Bon Bon, who is only five years old, had perfect occlusion but now it looks as if her teeth are being pushed out. They’re quite floppy—one has already been lost. Pictures and a description made the rounds of the goat and sheep lists and people have offered many observations but we still don’t know what’s afoot. The one vet who examined them pretty much summed things up when he said, “I’ve never seen anything like THAT!”

Worse and worse...

2010-01-08T13:09:00.003-06:00

I awakened at 6 a.m. to find our water pipes frozen. It turned out they weren’t frozen between the well house and our dwelling—a 14’ wide trailer we bought to live in until our cabin is built—as we initially thought, but that some critter tunneled under the skirting alongside the pipes, exposing them to overnight 3 degree temps and freezing them solid. John used a hair dryer to thaw the pipes (an act he never expected to do again in this lifetime) while I fed and by the time I was ready to tote buckets of hot water to the animals, I could fill some.

Everyone seems to be faring well. However, we ran out of our thought-to-be winter’s supply of rectangular bales of grass/legume hay yesterday morning just when everyone needs lots of hay. And apparently the goats think the fancy, $6 a bale Tifton 44 Bermuda grass hay John bought at the feed store stinks. I fed them enough bagged alfalfa to keep their rumens generating heat while they decide it’s the gourmet Bermuda hay in their feeders—or else. To complicate matters, four of the last load of big bales are too coarse for sheep and goats and packed with foxtail. Oh joy.

Temps are up to 14 degrees this afternoon but a strong wind (will it ever stop rocking the trailer?) is pushing wind chills to -4. Tonight the actual temperature is supposed to be zero. Too cold!

The animals, in fact, are holding up better than we are, though Bon Bon’s adolescent twins, Jadzia (pictured above) and Curzon are mightily tired of being shut in the dairy goat shelter. The coats of the ones like Meegosh (to the left) that live in Port-a-Huts, are as fluffy and thick as plush toys.

Baby, it's COLD outside!

2010-01-07T14:30:00.001-06:00

Last January we were without power for three weeks due to the epic Southern ice storm and hundreds of downed power lines in our county alone; this year our teeth are chattering. What gives? This is Arkansas; northernmost Arkansas, but still…

It’s 2 p.m. as I write this and 17 degrees F. out there with howling wind that drops the wind chill to -2. Area meteorologists are calling for wind chills of -16 tonight and a daytime temp tomorrow of 7 degrees!

Most of our animals dine outdoors, so we’ve moved their feed to more sheltered areas and the ones we can feed inside are inside. I’m carrying multiple buckets of steaming hot water three times a day, pouring it over ice frozen in their buckets.

Fortunately we still have the warm winter outerwear and water tank heaters that we needed to cope with life in Minnesota. But we were set up for blistering cold when we lived near Pine City and we sure aren’t here. It makes a difference. We’ve become Southern Sallies since moving down South!

The animals seem to be taking the cold in stride but I worry about them just the same. We kept horses and donkeys in Minnesota, not floppy-eared Boer and Nubian goats and a water buffalo.

Even the sheep are huddling inside their Port-a-Huts (we returned Rumbler—pictured above—and Ursula to their respective quarters yesterday morning before the big chill moved in). The only one who stood by his outdoor hay rack, despite the fact I’d already given the boys bagged alfalfa inside their Port-a-Hut and pitched long-stem grass hay to the back, this morning was—Mopple! When I filled it, Edmund tiptoed out, hesitated a heartbeat with his ears flying in the gale, looked at the snow, and then he scampered back to bagged hay in the Hut. Mopple tucked in to the hay in the rack. He’s one tough little sheep!

Aiah has a snit

2010-01-05T18:35:00.005-06:00

John put three big bales of hay out in the pasture so the horses and cattle are covered for the upcoming super low temps tomorrow through Friday night. The horses tucked into the first bale, so Aiah and Ludo moved away (the horses, even the minis, dominate both of them).

When John came through the gate with the second bale, Aiah (my Jersey-Holstein future riding steer) rushed up to it, obviously saying, "Stop! Stop! Put it down right here!" But John was taking it over into a more sheltered area, not leaving that one too close to the first bale. As the bale and tractor passed by, Aiah became quite frantic (keep in mind I forked about a ton of loose hay over the fence this morning—he was definitely not hungry) and started side passing alongside the bale. He side passed as beautifully as a dressage horse almost all the way across the width of the field and he'd have gone all the way had he not been purely focused on the hay bale and stumbled over a large tree branch that one of the oaks dropped last fall. I wish I'd had the camera! Anyone who thinks cattle are awkward should've been here. I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't seen it myself.

Then, when John set the bale down and Aiah caught up, he punished it for not stopping. He whipped around, repeatedly stabbing it with his horns while dancing and flinging his head. There was hay flying everywhere! John stayed on the tractor until he got over his snit. Once he'd made his point, he was fine.

Meanwhile I was minding the gate. Ludo (the water buffalo) came up and stood with me, watching this spectacle unwind (he assumed the cautious water buffalo stance with his head up and his chin raised—apparently he's never seen a thoroughly annoyed steer before either). After Aiah was through flinging hay and John got the mesh wrap off, Ludo ambled over and they both tucked in. These guys are so much fun!

The pictures of Aiah were taken a hour later, when he came up for a drink. The one of Ludo (below) was taken before it snowed. Are these cute faces or what!

Starting the new year with a bang

2010-01-03T11:27:00.005-06:00

I’m looking forward to April and May; this year we’re having lambs! The past few years with the economy and small sheep market what it is, we’ve bred only a few of our Classic/Miniature Cheviot ewes. This year five are expecting lambs.

We have five Classic/Miniature Cheviot rams on our farm, three black rams of my own and two white boys belonging to my friend, Lori Olson of Boscobel, Wisconsin. Last year’s beautiful lambs were all by Lori’s white ram, Oran of Shepherd’s Croft, except for Smoke (Wolf Moon Smoke on the Water), who is a whoops! lamb (and now a fleece wether and pet) conceived by parties unknown through the fence (it happens more often than you probably think).

This year I wanted to give my own young rams a chance, so Maxx (Wolf Moon Fin Bheara), a spotted black ram, serviced a breeding pen of three ewes in late November and my favorite, Rumbler (Wolf Moon Rumbler, pictured with his yearling son, Baamadeus, near the top of this entry), bred Maxx’s dam, Baatiste, two weeks ago.

I also wanted Rumbler to breed Lori’s beautiful ewe, Misty Glyn Little Bear, a.k.a. Ursula (pictured below), who, like Oran and his friend Wooby (Misty Glyn Gwyn ap Nud), is staying with us for awhile. Ursula had other plans.

She appeared to be in heat, lounging by New Ramsgate (the rams’ paddock), making goo-goo eyes at the boys through the fence, so I turned her into the yard with Rumbler and Baatiste. Big mistake! She began bashing Rumbler with a purple fury. He, in turn, was focused on breeding Baatiste, so he let her smash him. I finally decided she’d hurt him if they kept it up, so sadly put her in the fold with the other sheep.

A few days later she was flirting with the boys again, so I thought I’d breed her to Oran instead.

I put her in a breeding pen and went to get Oran. Oran usually dashes through the gate when I least expect it, necessitating chasing him around the yard with a bucket of grain. But he refused to budge and I tried to pull him forward (I should’ve gotten a halter and lead but did I? Noooo), he whirled and bashed me in my bad right knee. Ow!

So I said, “THE FIRST RAM THROUGH THIS GATE GETS TO BREED URSULA!” Unfortunately that was Baama (Wolf Moon Baamadeus) and Lori doesn’t care for his very extreme head. So I had to hold Baama back until another ram stepped forward. It was Maxx.

I took him to the pen to join his lady love and she turned on him with a fury. After whacking him a half dozen times it was as though a light went on (“Oh! You’re not Rumbler!”) and she cozied up to him and they got along fine—except that she wouldn’t let him breed her.

After eight days I threw in the towel, returned Maxx to New Ramsgate and Ursula to the rest of the flock.

Ursula spent her day by the rams again yesterday, all day, so I told her, "If you're jerking my wienie again, you aren't getting bred this year!"

I put the rest of the sheep back in the fold and she followed me (and a bucket of pellets) to the breeding pen, then I went to get a ram. I thought we'd go with Oran but once again he hung back and wouldn't come through the gate. The one that DID volunteer was Rumbler. I told him, "Oh, honey, Ursula doesn't like you, she'll beat you up." But he and Baama were the only ones making an effort to comply.

I led him across, put him in with Ursula and you'd have thought he was a giant Tostito (Ursula l-o-v-e-s Tostitos). She ran to him, purring, wagging her tail ("Oh Rumbler, you are such a hunk!") and he leaped aboard and (hopefully) made lambs. They're still cuddling and giggling among themselves and he's bred her about 100 times, so it seems as though her aversion toward him has passed.

So WHY she was cooing at the rams those last two times, I have not a clue! This time she is most definitely in heat. So we're looking at May 27 babies. I put in an order for one or two ewe lambs and considering their lovely parents, they should be doozies!

It's been forever!

2009-12-30T19:10:00.006-06:00

I apologize for not posting anything new for quite awhile. With everything going on here the past two months or so, I haven't engaged in much small ruminant training.

Sadly, I'm learning that though Mopple is a total sweetie, he is not the brightest bulb in the pack. I'm sure he'll learn to pull the wagon with no qualms but agility sheep status is probably beyond him. I have to lock our road gate every day Mopple is in the yard with the other animals because he has no concept of safety around motor vehicles. Last week the UPS truck would've hit him if the nice driver wasn't at the wheel and John nearly backed over him with the tractor. Revving engines doesn’t help. He’s too trusting and has no concept of danger; even when the other sheep and goats scatter, he stands and watches them go. Still, he's such a happy and pretty boy and pulling the wagon will be enough. I'm thinking one of the adult wethers might like to learn agility in his place.

Still, this will remain The Mopple Chronicles. He’s such a sweet, lover boy; he deserves this spotlight.

Another of our animal children in the spotlight is our Nubian buck, Martok, who blogs at the Hobby Farms Online website (www.hobbyfarms.com/hobby-farms-editorial-blogs/sue-weaver/default.aspx) and is featured on Hobby Farms’ free, downloadable “2010 Mondays with Martok calendar”. Download your copy here: www.hobbyfarms.com/hobby-farms-web-exclusives/2010-martok-calendar.aspx

It's been awhile

2009-11-24T10:32:00.003-06:00

Sorry I’ve been neglecting my blogs. John is visiting his extended family in Indiana for the holiday and between doing the chores and everyday upkeep and chipping away at Have a Cow and my Hobby Farms assignments, blogging completely slipped my mind.

BUT, here is my big news: I got the go-ahead from Storey to submit a proposal for Feeling Sheepish! To say I’m thrilled is an understatement. I began working on the proposal yesterday and am having the time of my life.

Much as I adore goats, I honestly prefer researching sheep. It’s the history, you see. Goats were domesticated before sheep by perhaps one to two thousand years, but because humans utilized wool even before domestication (they picked shed undercoat out of bushes and such), sheep and humans go way, way back.

And, sheep are just plain interesting creatures. Studying their behavior is fascinating stuff. Take Mopple, who despite being raised with Edmund, still prefers to hang out days with the sheep.

Old Angel, who was fostered on a doe is quite the opposite; she reluctantly spends her nights in the sheep fold (we can’t let her overnight with the goats lest she ingest too much copper from their mineral tubs) but she joins the goats the moment she’s let out for the day. Last month she marched past five rams to hang out by Martok’s buck run when she was in heat. He had a visiting girlfriend and paid her no mind; as you see, she seemed quite depressed.

This proposal gives me an excuse to add items to my sheep ephemera collection too, though I already have a fat photo album of goodies if the book is a go. The picture at the top of this entry is one of my favorites, taken around the turn of the century in Burra, a former mining and pastoral town in South Australia (read about Burra here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burra,_South_Australia and here: www.southaustralianhistory.com.au/burra.htm). Don’t you wish you knew the story behind this image? I’ve tried to find out, but no luck so far.

Too many irons in the fire

2009-11-11T19:21:00.005-06:00

Sorry I haven’t posted lately. It seems as though I’m going a dozen different directions at once these days and apart from ongoing leading lessons for Mopple and all the young goats, none of it has to do with training animals.

I did something stupid this week. With the economy so slow, I decided I’d breed only two of my little ewes this year rather than be overrun with lambs. I noticed old Rebaa (Coates Farm’s Rosy Lolita) in heat and lounging by Ramsgate 2 (that’s our rams’ pasture; Ramsgate is the pen they had when we had just three rams). So, on a whim, I asked John to help me round up Rebaa, Shebaa (Rebaa’s daughter, Wolf Moon Findabar, one of my best ewes), and Maxx (Wolf Moon Fin Bheara [pictured above], our young paint Miniature/Classic Cheviot ram) and put them in a breeding pen.

I hadn’t planned to breed Rebaa again since I thought she would be ten in March (I didn’t breed her due to her age last year either), but she’s such a wonderful producer that I thought why not? We’ll baby her a bit and she’ll be just fine. I asked her to please have two nice ewe lambs and Maxx bred her right away.

Later that evening I dug out her papers to check her age. I thought perhaps she was going to be nine instead of ten. But she’ll be eleven on March 22! I’ve really lost track of passing time. She’s in great shape but we’ll take her directly from the breeding pen to the elder sheep paddock so she gets extra TLC from start to finish.

Rebaa always has twins or triplets and for her past three lambings she’s picked out one for me to raise (the white sheep is Baa Baa Louie, the wethered son I raised in 2008). She looks them over for about an hour, decides which one is mine, then starts gently nudging it away. If I don’t take the hint and remove that lamb (which I didn’t, the first time this happened), she gets tougher until baby is bouncing off the sides of the lambing jug. Why does she do it? I honestly think she knows I love bottle lambs and wants to share. Sheep are amazingly astute!

The sun!

2009-10-31T18:47:00.011-05:00

Finally, sunshine! Everything is awfully soggy but we got outdoors and the animals loved it. Here’s an update picture of Mopple I took while he was grazing—not a good one but it shows his new, woolly coat.

The goats were in especially high spirits today. A bunch of does came in heat and lounged around Martok’s pen all day making goo-goo eyes while he blubbered and whooped and strutted. The poor guy’s nose is chapped from peeing on himself so much. It must be a strange life, being a buck goat!

Today I let Bon Bon’s twins, Curzon and Jadzia, out with the others to see if weaning finally took. After the first month’s separation, Bon Bon let them pick up nursing exactly where they let off. Not this time; she was having none of it, so unless they pester her so much this evening that she lets down her resolve, they’re back with Bon Bon and Latifah in the dairy shelter for good.

I shot this picture of Jadzia and one of my little Cheviot wethers (Baaxter) today. Jadzia is doing her “let’s smash our heads together” warm-up dance while a bemused Baaxter thinks, “What is wrong with this loony goat?”

Only seconds after I pressed the shutter, he took a few quick steps back and then charged and whacked her.

She stalked away in a huff, muttering that “stupid sheep don’t play fair, they smash before dancing!”

A peek at Ancon sheep

2009-10-29T08:54:00.003-05:00

Since it’s raining buckets yet again today and I’m not spending much time outdoors training sheep and goats, I thought I'd post this sheepy excerpt from my upcoming Storey book, Storey’s Guide to Raising Miniature Livestock. The photo is from Life magazine, 1947.

Enjoy!

Ancon Sheep—a Cautionary Tale

“In 1791, so it seems, a Massachusetts farmer named Seth Wright owned a flock of fifteen ewes and a ram of the ordinary kind. These sheep, as sheep are wont to do, were fond of leaping over the stone walls that fenced them in. Once out on their own, they raided Wright’s neighbors’ fields. So, imagine Farmer Wright’s surprise (and delight) when one of his ewes produced a most uncommon ram lamb, long of body and incredibly short of leg. Sheep like this, Wright correctly deduced, could not jump over stone fences

“So, Farmer Wright culled his normal ram, the short-legged ram’s sire, and bred the short-legged ram to his flock of ewes. The first year only two short-legged lambs were born. However, when he began breeding short-legged to short-legged sheep, the animals began to reliably reproduce their kind. And thus the Otter (later to be known as Ancon) breed of sheep was born.

“Charles Darwin considered Ancon sheep a perfect example of macroevolution. In Origin of Species, first published in 1859, he referred to the Ancon thus, 'It is a rare thing for a striking variety to spring as suddenly as this into existence, and it is singular that the peculiarity should be preserved unmixed in the cross or half-breed; but in other respects it is common-place enough and only represents what men do every day with their cattle, poultry, horses and dogs, and what is done by every nursery gardener in rearing plants. Whenever a breeder sees any peculiarity appear amongst his animals which he considers valuable, he carefully preserves the individual that shows it, and by pairing it with other individuals that manifest a tendency towards it, and selecting such of the offspring as have most perfectly inherited it, he succeeds in perpetuating and greatly improving it.'

“But was it an improvement? Ancons were achondroplastic dwarfs, a type of genetic dwarfism characterized by slow limb growth relative to the rest of the skeleton. Their condition was caused by a mutation that results in the failure of the cartilage between their joints to develop. Numerous other abnormalities existed, including abnormal spines and skulls, flabby subscapular (deep shoulder) muscles, loose leg joint articulations, and badly deviated inward forelegs. Adult Ancons were clumsy cripples that could neither run nor jump like other sheep; that they suffered from crippling arthritis is a given. The breed had so many major health problems that it became extinct decades ago.

“So as the adage goes, ‘It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature’. Should cute, mutated dwarfs happen along, it’s wise to choose not to propagate them. There are scores of breeds of small and miniature livestock available for producers and hobbyists to raise. Let’s do our best to raise animals that enjoy good quality of life.”

More sheepy this 'n that

2009-10-25T18:43:00.004-05:00

Here's another tidbit of sheepiana I've collected. It's a tale from Folk Stories from Southern Nigeria, a book published in 1910.

The sheep to the right is Lori Olson's Wooby (Misty Glyn Gwyn ap Nuad), a Miniature Cheviot ram who is living with us until Lori gets another farm. Wooby is a paternal half-brother to our first ram, Abram (Wolf Moon Finvarra), who sired our present ram, Rumbler (Wolf Moon Rumbler) and quite a few of our ewes.

Sheep Tales ~ The Story of Lightning and Thunder

In the olden days the thunder and lightning lived on the earth amongst all the other people, but the king made them live at the far end of the town, as far as possible from other people's houses.

The thunder was an old mother sheep, and the lightning was her son, a ram. Whenever the ram got angry he used to go about and burn houses and knock down trees; he even did damage on the farms, and sometimes killed people. Whenever the lightning did these things, his mother used to call out to him in a very loud voice to stop and not to do any more damage; but the lightning did not care in the least for what his mother said, and when he was in a bad temper used to do a very large amount of damage. At last the people could not stand it any longer, and complained to the king.

So the king made a special order that the sheep (Thunder) and her son, the ram (Lightning), should leave the town and live in the far bush. This did not do much good, as when the ram got angry he still burnt the forest, and the flames sometimes spread to the farms and consumed them.

So the people complained again, and the king banished both the lightning and the thunder from the earth and made them live in the sky, where they could not cause so much destruction. Ever since, when the lightning is angry, he commits damage as before, but you can hear his mother, the thunder, rebuking him and telling him to stop. Sometimes, however, when the mother has gone away some distance from her naughty son, you can still see that he is angry and is doing damage, but his mother's voice cannot be heard.

- Elphinstone Dayrell, Folk Stories From Southern Nigeria (1910)

More famous sheep (please keep 'em coming!)

2009-10-23T23:16:00.003-05:00

More Famous Sheep

Private Derby. Swaledale ram mascot of the British 95th Derbyshire Regiment (pictured at the right on a vintage postcard from my sheep ephemera collection)

Russell. Who lived in Frogsbottom Field in Rob Scotton’s charming children’s book, Russell the Sheep

Casserole. Kept by the Kennedy family in the Australian TV program, Neighbours, and Chop, the Kennedy's second sheep, introduced after Casserole's funeral

Lily Lamb. From Disney’s Minnie 'n Me

Timmy. A lamb in the Shaun the Sheep spin-off, Timmy Time (Aardman Animations)

Black Sheep. The black sheep of the family, he is a cousin of Cow and Chicken in the Cow & Chicken cartoons

Hiro Sohma. In the Japanese manga comics and anime series, Fruit Basket, Hiro Sohma is a human boy who morphs into the Zodiac ram

Derek the Sheep and Lenny the Sheep. Of the British comic strip, The Beano

Rammie. Mascot of the Derby County Football (rugby) Club in Derby, England

Mary’s little lamb. Who “followed her to school one day, school one day, schol one day...”

Ship. Imaginary friend and “counting sheep” in the Webcomic, Count Your Sheep

Larry the Lamb. Co-star of the British children’s radio series, Toytown, part of the BBC series, Children’s Hour, broadcast from 1922 through 1964.

Maghatch. The witch mouflon in Gary Kilworth’s heroic fantasy novel, Thunder Oak

Mopple the Whale and the other sheep (Othello, Miss Maple, Maude, Zora, Melmoth, Sir Ritchfield, Heather, Cloud, Ramses, Sarah, Lane, Cordelia, Maise, Willow, Fosco, and the Winter Lamb) in Leonie Swann’s wonderful sheep detective novel, Three Bags Full (published as Glennkill in Europe)

Louise the Lamb. Of the British children’s TV program, Muffin the Mule

Chirin. Sheep protagonist of the sad, 1978 Japanese anime film, Ringing Bell (Sanrio)

Georgina, Gogol, and Hubert. Sheep in the British Children’s BBC animated series, Sheeep (yes, with three e’s) aired in 2000

Sergeant Woolly Pullover, Commodore Fleece Cardigan, Major Legger Mutton, Pilot Fluff Pendleton, Master Sargent Cornelius Cannonfodder, Private Bull Bellwether, Commander Missiles Muttonchop, and Lieutenant Sureshot Shearling. R.A.M.S. in the Barnyard Commandos animated series (1984; Marikami-Wolf-Swenson Productions) and action figures collection (Playmates).

Lammy and his evil twin, Rammy. From the video game, UnJammer Lammy

Rain, rain (and more rain)

2009-10-23T20:55:00.006-05:00

I haven’t posted anything for awhile because everything is sodden, my pretty black and white lamb is grimy, and is still not much afoot around here anyway.

It’s cold, supposed to be down in the low 30’s overnight, but since the downpour abated (at least for awhile), I put Mopple and Edmund back out with the old sheep this afternoon. I had them back in their former pen for awhile so they’d stay warmer and dryer inside their Port-a-Hut, as opposed to the more open-air field shelter with the old ones. They have lots of wool already and don’t appear to mind getting wet, considering they voluntarily venture out to graze during the worst of it.

If I can’t do something with Mopple soon, I’ll start posting some sheepy fun stuff I’m collecting for the upcoming Storey sheep book, though it may be off in the distant future for awhile. Well, what the heck—might as well post an item this time too.

For your pleasure…

Famous Sheep

Dolly. The world's first cloned sheep

Bonnie. The first cloned sheep's first lamb

Maltilda. The first Australian cloned sheep

Lambchop. Sheri Lewis's wisecracking sidekick

Mrs. Sheep and Lambs. The sheep in Lambert the Sheepish Lion (Disney Studios)

The Toast of Botswana. One of the world's only two scientifically verified geep (half goat, half sheep)

Lisa. The cute German geep born a few years ago.

Dimitri. Balki's toy sheep (Perfect Strangers)

Shaun the Sheep. Wallace and Grommit's sheepy co-star in A Close Shave (Aardman Animations)

George. Sheepy star of the comic strip, Lost Sheep

Shrek. A famous Merino wether who eluded shearers for six years and grew a 60 pound fleece

Harold. The clever sheep (Monty Python's Flying Circus)

Mouth. Hammerhead Hannigan's bowtie-bedecked sidekick in Darkwing Duck (Disney Studios)

The Serta sheep. Out-of-work spokes-sheep for a major mattress company

Lanolin and Bo. Barnyard pals from the U.S. Acres comic strip

Maa. The Very Old Border Leicester ewe in Babe (Universal Pictures)

Bimbaabaa. The lamb in The Little Drummer Boy (a Bass/Rankin film)

Po and Merry. Sheep in the Stray Sheep cartoons

Mishun H. Sugworth. Also known as Mint Sauce, from the cartoon strip of the same name

Danny. Jeremiah's black lamb in So Dear to My Heart (Disney Studios)

Cardigan. Wilbur's friend in Charlotte's Web 2: Wilbur's Great Adventure (Paramount Studios)

Please let me know if you think of additional famous sheep!

~~~~~

Update: I've been Googling famous sheep tonight and came up with quite a few more names. I'll post them on a supplementary list to follow this one!

The old ones...

2009-10-14T17:03:00.008-05:00

Not much afoot here. My neck is bothering me unmercifully (I went to our chiropractor for an adjustment two weeks ago and he put my neck out—it’s a weird story), so I’m not able to be at the computer as much as I’d like to (or for that matter, need to be). I’m nearly finished with the Storey meat goat book update, then will officially start Have a Cow, although I already have about 12,000 words finished, doing some here and there as time permits.

On Sunday, John and Robert, the man we hire to help build fences, put up the dividing fence in the elder sheep pasture, though the gate still needs to be hung. When it is, Edmund and Mopple will move in with the elders. Then the kids (The Red Brothers and Bon Bon’s twins) will have their own paddock and shelter.

Our old ones are Baasha and Dodger. Both are quite arthritic but seem to enjoy their lives and as long as they do, we’ll keep them going.

Baasha is a registered Miniature Cheviot and will be 14 in March. She’s a cutie, my favorite sheep, and mom, grandma, great-grandma, or great-great-grandma to all of our other little sheep. She’s very sweet and gentle—a really stellar little ewe whose sire came from the Brighton flock upon which the Miniature Cheviot breed is based.

We’re not sure how old Dodger is but we’ve had him six years and he was no spring chicken when he moved in. Besides that, he’s a Hampshire wether, a huge meat breed wooly sheep not bred for longevity.

Dodger belonged to a 4-H boy in southern Arkansas who refused to send him to slaughter at the end of the 4-H fair (what a great kid!). Then he and our Wiltshire Horn cross ewe, Angel, performed in “The Witness” (http://www.witnessproductions.com/), the musical Passion play held throughout the summer months in Hot Springs, Arkansas. When they needed a retirement home, Anita Messenger of Liberty Ranch knew I wanted some pet sheep, so they came here to live out the rest of their days.

I'm lucky to have such neat sheep!

Now for something completely different...

2009-10-04T20:33:00.006-05:00

Maybe Mopple can learn to pack too! I don’t know why not. I ran across the first quote in this series while doing yak research for Storey’s Have a Cow.

I’d heard of Himalayan pack sheep but never any specifics. Sheep aren’t a supple as goats but they’re just as strong and they follow just as well. I can’t imagine a modern wool breed sheep in fleece wearing a pack saddle (ow!) but a hair sheep? Yeah, I do…

Quotes from books in public domain downloaded for free at Google Books (http://books.google.com/):

The yak-cow and hardy mountain sheep are the favourite beasts of burden in the inner ranges. The little yak-cow, whose bushy tail is manufactured in Europe into lace, patiently toils up the steepest gorges with a heavy burden on her back. The sheep, laden with bags of borax, are driven to marts on the outer ranges near the plains, where they are shorn of their wool, and then return to the interior with a load of grain or salt.

- The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Volume VI, W.W. Hunter. London: Trübner & Company, 1886

The principal beast of burden in the Himalayas is the Mountain sheep. It is said to comfortably draw a load of about twenty-five pounds and lives entirely on the herbage on the wayside. It has been known to travel a journey of 1000 miles and be little the worse for wear. Animals of this class were used in the Younghusband expedition in Tibet. It is common in the Himalayas to load sheep high up in the mountains with borax and then drive them down to the plains, shear them and return with loads, shear them and return with loads of grain or salt. They stand the severe cold of the higher ranges of Tibet better than any other animal, and are indispensable to the needs of transit of the people there.

- William James Clarke, Modern Sheep: Breeds and Management. Chicago: American Sheep Breeder Company, 1907

In some parts of India the sheep is even used as a beast of burden, carrying loads of 35 to 40 pounds over rough tracks, and up steep crags, where almost no other animal could be employed.

- Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, Volume VII. New York: Collier, 1887

Sheep lips

2009-10-02T15:19:00.003-05:00

We went to Hirschs’, the farm store in Thayer (MO) today to pick up feed. I stayed in the truck, organizing some writing material.

When John came out he said, “They have sheep lips, so I bought some.”

My mouth fell open. “Sheep lips?” I said. “Why would you buy sheep lips?”

Turns out he said SheepLix, as in tubs of sheep minerals in a molasses base as manufactured by the Sweetlix Company.

Most resources say it’s best to provide granulated minerals for sheep and goats but our goats simply won’t eat it. I have partial bags of five or six brands in the feed room right now and I’ve tried several more besides. They poop in the granulated mix holders—I know it has to be a game because there are always berries mingling with the minerals. I’m tired of throwing it out on a daily basis, so we’re going back to lix tubs (which the goats love but we’ve never tried with our sheep before today).

The bad thing (besides adding a lot of sugar to their diets) is that the goats smear it all over themselves. Here is a picture of the beautiful Affinity (UP Affinity) that I shot earlier today. Look at that mug—and you should see how much is smeared along her sides!

Another general update (of sorts)

2009-09-29T16:17:00.005-05:00

Tomorrow we’re going to band Mopple as he’s showing increasing interest in the other sheep, especially the ewes, and we don’t want any accidents since he’s (genetically) more than twice their size.

Not much is afoot on the training front as I once again have quite a few writing irons in the fire. I’m working on my corrections for the first pages (preliminary galleys) of Storey’s Guide to Raising Miniature Livestock (figuring out where to cut 20 pages is an interesting venture, especially since I need to add Ouessant sheep to the sheep chapter), finding reference images for the person who is illustrating Get Your Goat, and putting the finishing touches on my January-February Hobby Farms magazine assignments—all at the same time, while nursing a raging three-day (so far) headache.

Bon Bon’s twins, Jadzia and Curzon, appeared to be weaned, so I let them back out of the elder sheep pasture yesterday and moved The Red Brothers back there, thus freeing the round pen for training efforts. About an hour ago I glanced out the window and one was on each side of Bon Bon, nursing. Back to the drawing board with that.

My January-February Hobby Farms article is about water buffalo. The research convinces me once again that they are the perfect small-farm bovine. With that in mind I started a separate water buffalo blog in case anyone is interested. It’s listed under Favorite links to your right.

A vintage postcard—it’s a sheep!

2009-09-26T20:22:00.002-05:00

I found this image while cruising through some old CDs and thought I’d share it with you. Unfortunately, I didn’t buy this when I saw it at eBay several years ago but I’m watching for sheep ephemera again and will buy a copy when it resurfaces.

The picture was taken in Cuba in the early 1900's. The hitch is unusual in that it’s a three-up, but also because the animal in the center is a sheep. Maybe someday I can hitch Mopple flanked by The Red Brothers—who knows!

Onward and upward

2009-09-23T20:12:00.005-05:00

I weaned Mopple (and Edmund—for the second time at six months old, no less) a few days ago, so we’re ready to start working on basics. He leads but that’s all so far. He has really grown. I noticed this evening that he’s almost as tall as Edmund and I’m sure he’s heavier.

Uzzi is back with Martok again, so I’ll have to haul him out of the buck pen every time I work with him. He was just too mean to The Red Brothers, as in racing across the 60 foot round pen to whack one of them for no particular reason. And he’s happy as a clam to be back with Martok. Goats!

Get Your Goat is finished and it’s off to Storey for copy editing. I’m thrilled that Sarah Guare, who copy edited Storey’s Guide to Raising Miniature Livestock, is doing this one as well. I really enjoyed working with Sarah on our last project!

Now, on to Have a Cow. I hauled my cattle library out to my office today and dug out the fat pile of articles I printed when I put together the table of contents and my sample chapter. This will be fun! (remind me that I said that in a few months, okay?)

My baby!

2009-09-22T15:05:00.004-05:00

I’ll post a Mopple update tomorrow. In the meanwhile I want to share these pictures I took of Martok about an hour ago. My sweet, itty baby grew up practically overnight and now he’s a big, bruiser buck!

And right now he’s a big, bruiser buck living by himself since I moved Uzzi over to the round pen to start his harness goat training. I tried putting The Red Brothers in to room with Martok but while he’s okay with them most of the time, he occasionally decides to use one for a punching bag. That’s unacceptable, so they’re in the round pen with Uzzi for the time being. Uzzi is actually nastier to them than Martok is but it’s a larger area than the buck run and they can get away.

Once Mopple is banded (that’s going to happen soon, as he’s becoming seriously amorous and I can’t risk him impregnating my little ewes), Mopple and Edmund can live in the elder sheep pasture and The Reds can have the pen and Port-a-Hut they’re using now. Bon Bon’s children are staying in the elder pasture at the moment as they’re being weaned and The Reds can’t stay with them since The Reds have horns and Bon Bon’s twins are disbudded.

It is SO interesting figuring out who goes where, especially factoring in most goats’ propensity to beat the stuffings out of any goats smaller or weaker than themselves.

John made a singletree for my wagon shafts

2009-09-16T17:58:00.004-05:00

John made a singletree to go with the shafts assembly for my sheep and goat wagon. He also explained how to make the entire assembly. I wrote it down and it’s now part of chapter 10 (Wagons, Ho!) in Get Your Goat. It looks and sounds complicated to me but he says anyone who is reasonably handy with tools can make the whole assembly in half a day, for about $30 in materials.

It’s still raining here and everything is seriously soggy. I’ll have to bathe Mopple before taking pictures again. His pretty white parts are now dingy yellow parts. Funny, dirt and discoloration are much more obvious on Mopple’s coat than the white woollies’ fleeces.

Still not finished

2009-09-15T22:12:00.009-05:00

I didn’t make my book deadline and will be pushing hard for the rest of the week. Today’s weather didn’t help. We’ve had power outages and thunderstorms on and off for the past 24 hours, greatly interrupting my writing time.

I shot pictures of the wagon shafts yesterday and here they are. Tonight I asked John to explain, step by step, how he made them. To say I’m mindboggled is a vast understatement, so tomorrow, with the shafts in front of us, he’s going to try again. He says anyone reasonably handy with tools can make these. They are so nice!

Now I have to figure out where I put the singletree from my goat cart so he can put it on the wagon shafts for now. I packed everything when we moved our bedroom after last winter’s ice storm and it’s anybody’s guess which box it’s in. Organization is not a way of life at the Weaver household.

Time flies when you're having fun...

2009-09-13T20:44:00.005-05:00

Today John asked me how soon I’ll be weaning Mopple.

“He’s only six weeks old!” I said.

Then I started thinking…hmmm. So I checked and he’ll be 10 weeks old on Tuesday. How can that be? My baby is growing up!

I’m not going to make my book deadline on Tuesday, but it will be a wrap by the end of the week. I have to bite the bullet and stop with these 18 hour days; I’m starting to make serious mistakes.

I started looking for my Resources .doc file this morning at 1AM—and it wasn’t there. Around midnight I cleaned my desktop of stuff I didn’t need anymore and emptied my Recycle bin. Apparently I also grabbed the Resources file by mistake. I had to resurrect it using a copy I saved last week, trying to remember what I’ve added since then. Ha!

John finished the shafts for my wagon today and they are awesome. I’ll shoot pictures tomorrow if it doesn’t rain. Now I’m dying to try it out but I have to finish Get Your Goat before I do. Waaa!

I’ve pretty much decided that I’ll finish The Red Brothers’ basic training this winter, then move Hutch in with Martok and Uzzi with Meegosh for awhile. Uzzi and Meegosh both have strong work ethics and Hutch, not so much. It would be nice to train Uzzi to drive next spring when he's a full two years old. Both pairs, Hutch and Meegosh, Martok and Uzzi, have been together since they were tiny kids. I hate separating them but they will still see each other every day.

For those who don’t know Uzzi, here he is. He’s a 17 month old Nubian wether. This is a favorite photo taken last Christmas that hints at what a character he is.

I’m back! (but not for long)

2009-09-08T23:54:00.005-05:00

I’ve been offline since Friday. Our computers wouldn’t hook up with Centurytel, though precisely why, I don’t know.

When the Centurytel repairman crawled under my computer desk to check things out, he said, “I’ll have to remove this screen for a while.” It’s one of several small window screens I place in strategic locations when we have bottle babies in the house. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him it was there to keep a lamb from chewing the cords.

I probably won’t post again between now and next Tuesday. That’s when Get Your Goat is due. I am really burning the midnight oil (literally: it’s 11:48 as I write this). I seem to have hit a wall and I don’t like it!

Happy, happy!

2009-09-03T07:04:00.004-05:00

Here’s a tip from someone prone to depression (me) who uses holistic methods to manage the blahs. Get sheep and goats—they’ll make you smile each and every day.

Best, get a goat like Bon Bon, whose smiles and silly antics will make you smile and feel good too. I shot the above picture day before yesterday as she posed with her four-month-old twins, Jadzia and Curzon. The other picture was taken the day the twins were born. Bon Bon loves motherhood—and it shows!

No normal playground

2009-09-01T22:11:00.021-05:00

Many people build elaborate playgrounds for their goats to romp on. However, since I haven’t (yet) convinced John that our goats need one, apart a few wiring spools and overturned fiberglass horse tanks to jump on, they have to amuse themselves. And that they do—in the “hills” and holes out beyond the house.

John wasn’t here the day the septic tank was installed (and I was back in Minnesota minding horses) but up until two years ago he was pretty sure he knew where it was.

During the spring of 2008 he decided he wanted to give it a checkup, so he and Charlene (Charlene is our stinking and ornery vintage Case tractor), decided they’d uncover the lid. So, they dug—and dug and dug.

No septic tank.

John left the piled dirt and holes, intending to come back to the project it in a few days. Days stretched into weeks and then months, until late that fall he gave it another go.

Still no septic tank.

But by then we’d noticed our sheep and goats loved to play on the tailings. King of the hill is a favorite game for sheep and goats of all ages. The silly Boer does climb to the top, plop over on their sides and roll down into the pit; Salem and Shiloh kneel and scrub their faces in the ground. It’s a favorite place for the lambs to stage lambpedes—and what’s more fun than practicing ovine ninja kicks atop mounds of dirt and rock?

So the mini hills and hollows stayed. They remain an ongoing source of amusement as we watch our sheep and goats enjoy them from our living room window.

Would I like a “normal” playground for the sheep and goats? Indeed I would! But until it materializes, the septic tank pit is a decent alternative.

Mopple has a milk goiter

2009-09-01T20:10:00.012-05:00

Mopple has developed a small milk goiter. When our first bottle kids developed milk goiters (Salem and Shiloh, today’s 250+ pound behemoths), I thought “Oh no!” But a milk goiter is not a goiter in the usual sense of the word: healthy, well-fed goat kids and hair sheep lambs often develop milk goiters while they’re nursing.

The best discussion of milk goiters I’ve seen is Karin Christensen’s article at Biology of the Goat: www.goatbiology.com/milkgoiter.html (note the good pictures of a Katahdin lamb with pronounced milk goiter on the page). Her explanation, based on the results of a 1988 study appearing in the British Goat Veterinary Society Journal: Milk goiter is part of the maturation of the immune system; it's a common, normal enlargement of the thymus gland.

Another unusually good article about milk goiter is this one at the Fias Co Farm Web site (this site is a best bet for reliable information about goats): http://fiascofarm.com/goats/milk_neck.htm. Click on Milk Neck Photo Gallery at the bottom—note that number 5 appears to be a Katahdin-Dorper lamb a lot like Mopple.

At four months of age, Bon Bon and Martok’s son, Curzon, has finally outgrown his milk goiter (it was a big one!). His twin, Jadzia, didn’t get one at all. Why some kids and lambs develop them and others don’t remains a mystery.

Speaking of Jadzia and Curzon, Edmund and Mopple have begun chumming with the twins during the day. Here are Curzon (red wether), Mopple and Jadzia (black doeling) in a picture taken earlier today.

A near miss!

2009-08-26T19:32:00.012-05:00

I am so glad rams don’t behave like male goats. We have five rams and one buck; tonight I’m thinking one buck is more than enough.

As rut draws near the rams are growing fatter noses and growling at one another quite a bit—and that’s the extent of their rutty behavior. In the meanwhile, Martok (Ozark Jewels General Martok, Nubian buck extraordinaire) is making our Stink-o-Meter spin like an airplane propeller.

Last year he was a yearling. Although he engaged in the usual dubious bucky behaviors like peeing in his face and whooping loudly at the pretty does (and even some of the ewes), his musk glands apparently hadn’t matured. So, he was pretty mild-smelling, all things considered.

They’re mature this year. He makes our previous bucks (all registered Boers) smell like Chanel No.5. The crown of his head is oily-stinky and it reeks to high heaven. The fact that his face is usually drenched with urine adds to the ambiance.

And, like all good bucks who know their mamas love them, he thinks he has to put his scent on me. This usually amounts to vigorous scrubbing with his head (while I try to hold him back and shout, “No! No!”). He doesn’t scrub John; he pees on John’s shoes.

Tonight after feeding I decided to dunk myself in the little plastic wading pool that serves double duty as a watering hole for sheep and goats and a refreshing place for John and me to cool off. I shed my shoes, climbed in, closed my eyes and settled back—ahhhh!

A few minutes later something (intuition?) said, “Open your eyes.” I glanced over my shoulder and—there was Martok twisting his body sideways to deliver a jet of urine in my direction. I set a world record leaping out of the pool!

He seems so disappointed at my lack of appreciation. He’s a former bottle baby and an incredibly sweet guy, but bucks have decidedly strange ideas during rut. He’s only trying to mark me as his property, but I do not want him to do that, no siree!

An update—of sorts

2009-08-24T17:37:00.003-05:00

I haven’t done much with Mopple for a week or so as I’m working hard at finishing Get Your Goat! He and Edmund spend the day in the yard or out in the pasture with the other sheep and goats, then go back into their own little area at night.

He’s getting to be a big boy. When anyone opens the door, he and Edmund are right here wanting in the house. Edmund hops up the steps and Mopple leaps directly from the ground into the doorway in a single bound. We let them stay a short while, and then they go out again.

I've noticed that Mopple is growing a soft, woolly undercoat now. If you look closely at the picture above (taken a few hours ago), you can see some of it at his upper shoulders and neck. I wonder if this means we'll have an early winter? It can't come soon enough for me!

Jumping for joy!

2009-08-17T15:59:00.008-05:00

Life is Goooood! I just heard from Deb Burns at Storey that I have until September 15 to finish Get Your Goat! I am so relieved. I want to do an especially good job with this book (after all, I want folks to read it and come away as enchanted with goats as I am) and have felt awfully harried these past few days.

The folks at Storey Publishing (http://www.storey.com/) are awesome. I’ve been writing since 1969 and have never worked with a nicer group. I enjoy writing for Hobby Farms magazine (http://www.hobbyfarms.com/) too, of course, but writing books for Storey is a dream come true.

Many years ago I bought a copy of Cherry Hill’s book, Becoming an Effective Rider. It's a terrific book—great content combined with beautiful design and quality printing. I said to myself, “One day I want to write books just like this one.” Now I do!

I am a slow writer—I wish I was faster but I’m not—and Storey has been wonderful about working with me and flexible deadlines. My editors are always cheerful when I need more time, despite the fact I know they’re probably tearing out their hair. If any of my editors are reading this, thank you, I really appreciate your kindness!

Storey’s Guide to Raising Miniature Livestock will be published in 2010, then Get Your Goat! As soon as I’m finished with Get Your Goat! I’ll be updating Storey’s Guide to Raising Meat Goats (my first book for Storey, written under my pseudonym, Maggie Sayer), then I’ll start writing Have a Cow! That should be fun to write as it isn’t your usual cattle book. Instead, it will cover topics like keeping a household dairy cow (and making yummy things with her milk) and teaching a cow or steer to ride and drive. I’ll also talk about selecting a breed (including alternate ‘cattle’ such as yaks and water buffalo ) and small-scale cattle keeping and the book will be packed with tons of fun stuff too.

Now, back to work on Get Your Goat!—but at a more comfortable pace (hurrah!).

Nokomis' Rules of Karate (as practiced by goats)

2009-08-16T18:28:00.000-05:00

Twenty years or ago I worked with a remarkable woman named Audrey Wyman, a.k.a. Nokomis (no-ko-MEES; Ojibwe for “grandmother”).

Audrey almost singlehandedly raised 14 children after her husband left home; went back to college to get her degree so her family wouldn’t have to accept welfare, then taught school on one of the northern Minnesota reservations for many years; and in her late 60’s was still canoeing solo in the Boundary Waters. What an inspiration!

Audrey was also into karate. One day told me something that’s stayed with me lo these many years. These are, she said, the three basic tenets of karate: don’t be where trouble is; if trouble comes, run; and if you can’t run, fight. Tonight Moople and Edmund demonstrated what I’ve come to call "Nokomis’ Rules of Karate" to a T.

Here is Mopple, intent on breeding Edmund, who was not at all amused by his friend’s antics (“Don’t be where trouble is”).

So, he tried to leave trouble behind (“If trouble comes, run”).

And, because Mopple is just so doggoned insistent, he finally said, “Enough of this!” (“If you can’t run, fight”).

Not that it impressed Mopple the tiniest bit.

Lemonade!

2009-08-15T19:43:00.001-05:00

Remember the saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade” (we’re old hippies, we remember when it was the saying du jour)? We did exactly that this morning.

I got up at 6:30 AM, took bottles to Mopple and Edmund, let Martok and Uzzi (our Nubian buck and his wether friend) out in the yard for walkabout time, then came in to write until time to feed and milk. Shortly after 7 AM the power went out. So I read until feeding time and then did the chores but the power was still out at 9:30 when I put the bottled goat milk in ice water to cool. Since we live in a mobile home and this being mid-August in the Arkansas Ozarks, things were heating up pretty seriously. John suggested we put the dogs in the outdoor dog yard to stay reasonably cool, stop by the post office to see if my paycheck was there, and then go on to Batesville to buy my wagon.

So we did. I fed the guys their second bottle a little early (I’m feeding Mopple 12 ounces of goat milk, four times a day), made sure they had plenty of cool water (I plopped in two Philly Cream Cheese container ice cubes to be sure) and loose hay, and off we went.

It’s 80 miles to Batesville from here (Batesville is the closest decent-size town), so we had plenty of time to chat, then we enjoyed a fine lunch at a Chinese buffet we’d never tried before (mm-mmm, noodles!). Then, off to TSC.

TSC had three wagons in stock: a humongous silver model, a medium-size green one and a smallish red wagon. While red would’ve been nice to match the harness, the wheels on that model were awfully close together, so it didn’t seem stable. The green one is a good size for an adult goat or Mopple-size sheep to pull and the tires are set much farther apart, so that’s the one we chose.

So, John started pulling it toward the front of the store. Wait, I said, they won’t let you take the floor model, we’ll have to take a boxed one and put it together! Sure they will, he replied—just watch. And darned if the cashier didn’t let him have it. She not only let him have it (without charging extra for assembly), she followed him out to the van to help him load it. Who’d have thunk it!

Now I have a wagon (as soon as John makes its shafts) and a harness; it’s just a case of figuring out which goats to train to pull it and then, training them.

By the time we got home at 1:30 PM it was 94 degrees with the humidity really cooking (though mercifully the power was restored and the air conditioner humming), so I’d best wait till tomorrow to work with a goat.

I think Uzzi is the way to go but I’ve never worked with him separate from Martok, so we’ll do some leading refresher training out in the yard (with increasingly smelly Martok back in their paddock) before introducing something new.

An alternative might be Morgan the Sable though he doesn’t ‘do’ heat at all well (he has to pant a lot); he does, however, love attention (and food rewards!) of any kind.

Kes, our Boer herd queen wants to be a working goat (I’m going to lose some of you, I fear, when I admit I learned that via animal communication) and she’s cute, short and very, very blocky and strong, so she’s on the agenda too.

So many goats—so little time!

My harness came today!

2009-08-14T20:48:00.001-05:00

John just came home from work with a package from the post office—my new wagon harness came today!

For those of you who don’t know, I entered this picture of Teasel (she’s telling sheep jokes: “Hey, did you hear the one about the six-legged ewe from Albuquerque?”) in the goat photo contest Marna Kazmaier hosted at her Working Goats Website (http://www.workinggoats.com/). It was judged on the number of votes each picture received during the entire month of July. The prize: one of Marna’s neat goat wagon harnesses.

I asked my family and friends to vote and it snowballed until about a million people were voting for Teasel’s picture every day. However, Diane in Kentucky (if you’re reading this, Diane, I’m sorry—I don’t know your last name) had an enormous following too. Our pictures battled it out all month long. As the contest closed, Diane’s cute picture of two packgoat kids crossing a wooden bridge captured 13% of the votes and Teasel, 12%. I didn’t win the harness.

So imagine my surprise when, two days later, Marna e-mailed to tell me an anonymous benefactor purchased a harness for me! I have no idea who it was but I’m very grateful (if you see this, again, thank you very much!).

So, the harness came today and it’s exactly like the prize in the photo contest: red with black trim. And such nice workmanship! Unlike my leather driving harness, it’s lightweight and beautifully stitched—perfect for a goat hitched to a utility wagon.

Tomorrow, book deadline or no, I’m going to take time to try it on one of my goats. Since it’s a standard-size harness and my Boer-Nubian wethers, Salem and Shiloh, are behemoths, I think I’ll fit it to a heretofore untrained goat. I’m thinking Uzzi would like to learn to pull a wagon and eventually, Kes, our Boer herd queen.

And, (yippee!) it’s the perfect size for Mopple when he's all grown up—and won’t red look splendid against his black and white coat!

When my next check comes, we’re off to TSC in Batesville to buy a wagon. I plan to convert one exactly like the setup in the picture below (the picture is compliments of Marna Kazmaier).

Racing toward a deadline

2009-08-13T19:48:00.000-05:00

The Red Brothers, Meegosh and Hutch, watch Edmund and Mopple playing in the yard.

I won’t be blogging much for the next two weeks as I enter the home stretch toward my Get Your Goat! book deadline. Somehow I thought it was due on September 15 but it’s due on September 1, so it’s going to be a rush to the finish!

Mopple and Edmund are becoming fast friends. I keep Freddy, the puppy, indoors for several hours every day and let Mopple and Eddy out into the yard. Edmund stays with Mopple now instead of hanging out along the fence with The Red Brothers. He and Mopple have also learned which of the sheep and goats will and won’t butt them so they sometimes hang out with their milder-mannered older and bigger peers.

It's working!

2009-08-11T20:58:00.000-05:00

This afternoon Mopple and Edmund were playing together, chasing each other around the pen, up and over the rock pile and back again, taking turns being “it”. They’re bonding. Yay!

Blessed silence

2009-08-08T20:33:00.000-05:00

I’m glad to report that Edmund has decided there are worse things in life than living with a lamb (and drinking bottles of milky water at intervals throughout the day). He’s been showing Mopple how tasty their hay is and they’re lying by one another today. Oh, and did I mention that late this afternoon Edmund stopped screaming for The Red Brothers? Bliss!

Unhappy campers (with loud voices)

2009-08-07T11:48:00.001-05:00

It’s still very hot and humid but there’s a nice, stiff breeze blowing, so I decided to put Mopple and Edmund together today. It’s working fairly well, though Edmund is a very unhappy camper.

For those who aren’t familiar with goats, Nubians are arguably the most vocal goats on earth and some have astoundingly loud and strident voices. When Edmund was small he sounded like a demented jungle bird (with great lungs). His voice has improved but the boy certainly has volume and he’s in full voice today.

Since moving outdoors, he’s been bunking with two slightly older Nubian wethers named Meegosh and Hutch, collectively known as The Red Brothers. They aren’t biological twins (Hutch’s mom graciously adopted Meegosh and raised him with Hutch) but naturally they are very close. So while they’ve been tolerating Edmund, they tend to treat him as an outsider and I didn’t think they’d mind him leaving.

Not so! Meegosh is shrieking almost as loudly as Edmund, so it’s pretty noisy here today. The up side is that Edmund is so focused on getting back with The Red Brothers that he’s largely ignoring Mopple. Mopple seems to think that's fine.

An odd twist is that when I took Mopple his bottle, Edmund demanded one too. Usually, once bottle kids are weaned they won’t take a bottle again. So, I put a few ounces of milk in a bottle, added ten ounces of water, and gave that to Edmund to keep him occupied while Mopple eats. It’s not an ideal situation but for now it will have to do. I upended a water container in the pen to sit on while I feed these guys, to make certain Edmund doesn’t mob Mopple for his milk. He stopped a few times and eyeballed the milky water with suspicion but he drank it. We’ll see what happens next time…

Mopple grows up

2009-08-06T14:16:00.000-05:00

Mopple is growing up! I weighed him this morning: 20 pounds! He’s nibbling some hay now and tastes just about everything, including dirt.

I haven’t been doing much with Mopple these past few days as I’m hustling to finish some writing assignments so I can get back to Get Your Goat—due the first of next month.

Mostly we’ve been polishing leading skills and working on indoor manners. As many bottle babies seem to do, he’s house trained himself to some degree: he returns to his crate if he has to pee rather than going in the house proper. So, I let him wander around in the evening while I work at the computer.

We’ve had only two problems. One, he likes to chew electrical cords (as all kids and lambs do), so I’ve put everything up out of his reach. The other thing is pretty unique: he’s determined to sneak up and then hump on my leg. This is a bottle baby first.

For those that don’t know this, like baby males of many animal species (sheep, goats, cattle and llamas to name a few), Mopple was born with a frenulum (a small, elastic piece of tissue) that secures his penis inside of his sheath. He won’t be able to extend his penis until it breaks loose and he’s determined to do this sooner than later. This is why lambs and kids spend so much time play-breeding their moms, sisters and others in their herd or flock and also why goat kids “air hump” (which is a pretty amusing process to observe). Normally Mopple would be assaulting his playmates—not my leg.

Telling him ‘no’ and placing his front feet back on the ground wasn’t getting through, so I asked for suggestions at HFSheep (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HFSheep). Rebecca suggested a squirt gun. A quick spritz from a squirt gun or spray bottle is the traditional means to repel over-enthusiastic goats (because they hate to get wet). Two spritzes and Mopple got the point. Now why didn’t I think of that?

I hope the oppressive heat breaks soon, so I can put Mopple and Edmund (Nubian former bottle baby pictured below) together to see if they can be friends. I can’t imagine why not—Edmund is not a pushy kid—but I need to be out there for a few hours to make certain they get along. It’s about time for Mopple to move out of the house, but not until he has a pal to console him at night. Edmund has been living with The Red Brothers and they treat him like the odd man out, so he’s the logical choice to become Mopple’s buddy.

Really scary Saturday

2009-08-02T20:27:00.000-05:00

Background: five or six weeks ago, some lowlife dropped six small puppies at the end of our neighbor’s driveway: three Beagle mixes and three pups that appear to be a cross of Dachshund and Beagle. Our neighbor is diabetic and on disability, so with his own dog to provide for, the puppies were way too much. He easily placed two of the Doxie mixes, then no one seemed to need pups. So, being soft hearted (or maybe soft headed) and despite already being an eight-dog family, last month we agreed to take the last of the Doxie mixes, a charmer our neighbor called Fred.

Fast forward to the present. I’m housetraining Fred, so when indoors and unsupervised, he bunks in a puppy crate alongside Mopple’s crate. As a result, they’ve become good pals. So much so that Fred spends his outside time lounging alongside Mopple’s fence when Mopple is in the outdoor pen.

So on Saturday morning, after feeding animals, milking the goats and depositing Mopple in the pen for the day, John and I headed off to the grocery store for grub.

It was time for Mopple’s bottle when we got home, so I heated his milk and took it out to him. He usually meets me at the gate ravenously (or so he says) hungry. This time he didn’t. As I opened the gate, Fred raced out of the Port-a-Hut. What? How did he get in there? And where is Mopple? I rushed to the Port-a-Hut to see. Fred had cornered him and bitten him several times and Mopple was in shock.

I rushed to the house with Mopple: he had a small nick behind one ear and superficial bites on both shoulders. The injuries weren’t much but his shocky condition scared me—a lot. I gave him Reiki (I’m a Reiki practitioner) and held him on my lap while John dabbed his injuries with emu oil. Gradually over the next few hours he recovered.

Today he was spronking around the yard, good as new but I kept him indoors except for exercise periods lest flies bother his wounds.

And where did Fred get in? The tiniest hole where a goat had bashed the fence. It’s fixed now but I’ll be watching closely when Mopple goes out again. My poor little guy!

This is why dogs, except for LGDs, should never be trusted with sheep and goats. Even though Fred and Mopple are buddies, no doubt when Fred got in the pen, Mopple ran, and to any dog running sheep and goats are prey.

Mopple is okay but what if we hadn’t come home when we did? Never take dogs for granted. Unsupervised dogs, even sweet, household pets that think they are only playing can easily kill or maim a goat or sheep.

Mopple moves outdoors (part-time)

2009-07-29T11:46:00.000-05:00

Not much has happened the past few days as it’s been very hot and humid and I’ve been under the weather with an oogy tummy.

Mopple has been spending part of the day out in the pen Big Mama and Tank (goats) use at night. It’s escape-proof and this way he can safely interact with the other sheep and goats through the fence. He isn’t enthused about this and screams when first deposited in the pen, though he settles down fairly quickly.

He tries to interact with the sheep when I have him loose in the yard with me (I pick him up when the adult goats are nearby, lest they butt him). Most of the ewes and wethers accept him but the spring lambs think he’s scary and stomp their feet to warn him away.

He’s drinking water from a pan but (so far) isn’t interested in dry feed (apart from nibbling grass). I’ll pick up some Honey Nut Cheerios today and feed a few to the little guy. They’re perfect rewards for clicker training sheep and goats.

This morning I left the door to the walk-in closet open (it’s an unused bedroom) and found him in there repeatedly butting a bag of raw Cheviot fleece with all his might. He gets on butting jags from time to time, though he quickly learned that butting humans is unacceptable.

Mopple's indoor home (bottle babies in the house)

2009-07-24T07:51:00.000-05:00

Mopple is almost ready to move up to the bigger bottle baby crib—an enormous “wolf-size” wire dog crate. This is a record: he’s growing even faster than our Boer goat kids!

Our first indoor lamb and kid crib is a large, wire dog crate we bought not long after we were married, so it’s at least 35 years old! It’s nice because in addition to the usual front-opening door, the top flips open for easy access to the baby inside. We usually leave the top open for the first few weeks, especially when housing small Miniature/Classic Cheviot lambs. However, Mopple is tall and unusually active, so we closed it right from the start.

When there are two occupants they keep one another company but when there’s only one, I usually put a plush toy animal in the crate for company. Since Vanessa sent Delilah’s shed fleece along with Mopple, he had that to cuddle and sleep on.

The secret to relatively odor-free indoor bottle baby keeping is using lots of easily washable bedding. I use old bath towels, secondhand infant receiving blankets and large pieces of old bed blankets (pieces are better than whole blankets because you can choose exactly the right amount of padding and pieces are more easily laundered).

I start with a very absorbent layer; worn wool blankets from the used-a-bit shop work especially well but towels do the job too. The middle layer can be anything. The top layer should be lightweight and easily wash- and dryable because it must be replaced every time the baby poops. Healthy milk-fed lamb and kid poop is yellow and (if you’re on track) log-shaped; if the baby’s digestion is at all off-kilter, pudding consistency (or worse). Mopple has been a gem: little logs all the way (hooray!).

To further quash odor and to keep things tidy, I wipe the crate down with Lysol every time I completely strip the bed. Barring incidents, I do that three times a day.

When things are kept clean there is little or no odor until the kid or lamb starts eating solids around two to three weeks of age. Then urine takes on a more pungent aroma.

Most of our kids and lambs move out at about three to four weeks of age, depending on whether or not they have a companion and things are getting crowded (and smelly!). The long-term record is held by Tumnus, a Boer-dairy goat cross seized in an animal neglect case and given to me by our veterinarian. His urine never started to reek and ensconced in the wolf-size crate, he lived in the house for six whole weeks.

Of course, the option is to housetrain the lamb or kid. That’s doable, but we’ll talk about it another time!

We're showing progress!

2009-07-23T07:36:00.000-05:00

Mopple is hard to photograph! His features get lost in his very black face.

I’ve never started lead training a baby this young but things are coming along nicely.
Using the bottle as a reward a la Squishy in The Box Game (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXCtBdA_nuM) didn’t pan out as Mopple is extremely focused on food and continually mobs me if he knows I’m holding the bottle. So, I’m scratching his back as a reward for now. Next time I go to town I’ll buy a box of Honey Nut Cheerios and teach him to eat Cheerio rewards (my goats love these).

So far we’ve only led indoors (no distractions) but since the day is dawning bright and clear, today I’ll take the project outdoors.

I’ve been thinking ahead to moving him to outdoor quarters when he’s older (that won’t happen for a couple more weeks). I think I’ll buddy him up with Edmund, the Nubian kid I started clicker training this spring. Edmund is disbudded and also black (with frosted ears and a few white spots), so they should make a cute pair for exhibitions. Edmund is older but he’s not a huge kid; by the time Mopple moves out, they should be a good match, weight-wise, though Edmund will be taller.

Mopple's collar

2009-07-21T19:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoon I found a collar for Mopple at the farm store. It’s a cute red number made of faux suede with an elastic insert, brass-colored fittings and a bell (yep, it’s a cat collar).

We keep a brass goat bell suspended in the bottle baby crib, so Mopple’s already used to the sound of bells a’tinkling. He’s the first lamb to actively play with the bell (and in the wee hours of the morning, no less); kids love it but until now, our lambs pretended it wasn’t there. So, he didn’t fuss a bit when I strapped the bell-clad collar around his neck. Then I took him outdoors for a run.

The three older rams come out in our yard for a few hours every evening; this was their first nose-to-nose meeting with the lamb. They crowded forward to sniff him; he didn’t care, he simply kept spronking and practicing ninja kicks. Wooby gave Rumbler a knowing look and rolled his eyes. They put their heads together and began mumbling. I couldn’t help myself—I eavesdropped. This is what they said.

“Did you see that thing around his neck?” Oran demanded.

“Yeah,” said Rumbler. “It has a bell on it and it’s red!’

“Disgusting.” Wooby sighed as the lamb spronked by. “Disgusting and very un-sheeplike. Next thing you know, we’ll have to wear them too!”

Mopple wasn’t nearly as enthused when I snapped a featherweight leash to his collar but today he was yielding to pressure quite well.

Tomorrow I’ll introduce the clicker! Weather permitting (it’s pretty crummy out there today) I’ll do it outdoors a shoot some pictures to share.

A Mopple update

2009-07-19T15:28:00.000-05:00

Mopple enjoyed yesterday’s outing immensely. The other sheep and some of the goats watched him zoom around the yard in amazement.

The white sheep watching Mopple play is Louie (Wolf Moon Louie), my two year old former bottle baby and the last bottle lamb I raised before Mopple. He’s an unusually smart and biddable wether and would make a neat agility and trick sheep (and after Mopple, I may attempt to train him as such) but is too small for carting. He’s a Miniature/Classic Cheviot and stands about 20.5” at the shoulder.

Today we drove to Thayer (MO) to the nearest Wal-Mart to buy a small dog collar for Mopple so I can start clicker training him to lead. They were not only out of small dog collars but didn’t have cat collars in stock either. John is going to pick up something at the larger Wal-Mart in Ash Flat (AR) tomorrow on his way to work.

Mopple is growing so quickly! Vanessa weighed him at seven pounds when he was one day old; I just weighed him at 13.8 pounds, so he’s almost doubled in weight. He’s definitely an eager eater and has begun nibbling plants when I have him outdoors. I have a hunch he’s going to be a big boy!

I’ll be writing an assigned article about hair sheep for Hobby Farms this coming year, so have been reading about them and printing out research material. Based on what I’m learning and factoring in how next to impossible it is to find shearers in many parts of the country nowadays (ours included), it’s hard to understand why anyone raising meat sheep doesn’t switch. We’re seeing more flocks of Dorpers and Katahdins in the Ozarks all the time and it looks as though quite a few goat ranchers in this region are switching to hair sheep as well.

More about Mopple as soon as he gets his collar. I still have my big Boer wethers’ baby collars around here somewhere but darned if I can find them!

Sheep or goat?

2009-07-15T19:31:00.000-05:00

He looks like a sheep but he’s a goat. Traveling children’s photographers in days gone by often photographed youngsters in a cart or wagon drawn by a goat. Thanks to their impressive horns and long, luxurious locks, Angora goats were the cart goat of choice. Note this handsome Angora goat’s tail and the shape of his horns—dead giveaways that he isn’t a sheep.

Sheep or Goat?

Some folks think hair sheep like Mopple resemble goats. While that’s somewhat true, they aren’t the same; there are easily noticeable physical differences between sheep and goats.

Consider tails. Unless they’re frightened or ill, goats’ tails stick up; they’re short, with a fringe of longer hair at the sides. Sheep’s tails always hang down. Wool sheep lambs are born with long, woolly tails (www.sheep101.info/tails.html) that are usually docked (shortened) to help prevent flystrike later on. Flystrike is a particularly nasty condition in which blowflies lay their eggs in the wool on sheep’s manure-encrusted tails; when the eggs hatch, the resulting maggots secrete enzymes that liquefy their host’s flesh and create a nasty, open wound. Because hair sheep lambs don’t have wool on their tails, they needn’t be docked. Mopple gets to keep his cute tail.

What about a beard? Goats of both sexes can have beards, though not every goat has one. Sheep never have beards, though rams of most hair breeds have manes: longer hair on their shoulders and their lower necks.

Look at those horns. Unless they’re disbudded (http://kinne.net/disbud.htm) or dehorned, nearly all goats have horns, though polled (naturally hornless) goats exist; sheep come in polled and horned breeds (in some horned breeds only rams have horns, in others both sexes have them). The horns on most goats sweep back and then up or out while horns on most sheep breeds curve into loops at the sides of their faces. Dorpers and Katadhins are both naturally polled; Mopple won’t have horns.

If it’s a male, does he make you think pee-ooo? Bucks have the charming habit of spraying urine on the backs of their front legs and into their faces while they’re in rut (girl goats find this sexy); during rut, scent glands near their horns (or where their horns would be if they are polled or disbudded) emit a strong aroma too. Rams don’t reek when they’re in rut (score one for sheep!).

Goats are (usually) hairy; sheep are (generally) woolly. This, however, is not a given. Most hair sheep breeds (www.sheep101.info/hair.html) are carpeted in coarse hair with a soft, fluffy undercoat under that; some breeds grow short wool. Both types of hair sheep spontaneously shed their winter coats, whereas wool sheep must be shorn once or twice a year. To confound things, Angora goats (http://www.angoragoat.com/) grow long, lustrous, non-shedding locks of fiber; many people mistake Angoras for sheep.

Check the lip. A sheep’s upper lip is divided by a distinct groove; while there is a shallow crease in a goat’s upper lip, it’s only superficial.

The eyes have it. Sheep have distinct tear-shaped scent glands at the lower corners of their eyes as well as scent glands between their toes; goats don’t.

And though you can’t see this. Sheep have 54 chromosomes whereas goats have 60. This is why sheep and goats are rarely inter-fertile. Very, very infrequently a geep is conceived and carried to term. Be sure to visit this site (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-513047/How-night-passion-sheep-goat-led-Lisa-GEEP.html) to read about Lisa the German geep—she’s adorable! Geep can also be produced in the laboratory, in which case they’re called chimera (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geep) and they’re pretty darned cute too.

Mopple's education

2009-07-12T12:32:00.000-05:00

It’s still rainy today so the light outdoors is bad. However, here are a couple of so-so pictures taken of Mopple out in the yard. He obviously enjoyed his outing and spronked and streaked around the yard nonstop. He is one energy-packed boy!

Several years ago, I began collecting goat and sheep ephemera at eBay, primarily vintage photos and postcards. From time to time I’d happen upon an item depicting a sheep hitched to a cart or wagon. A pretty neat concept, I thought!

Later I talked with a man who trained his Hampshire ram to drive. It worked, he said, but the wool was a problem. Sheep have sensitive skin and pulling their wool hurts them, so you can imagine how having harness leather tugging on wool must feel.

So, I started thinking that some day I’d like to have a hair sheep wether to train, but the thought kept getting backburnered. Then last year I decided to put together a program showing what neat things can be done with goat wethers and I thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat to include a sheep wether too?”

About the same time, I discovered YouTube. While searching for videos demonstrating clicker training (I’ve done this with horses for many years), I found these gems. Then I was really enthused!

Spotty’s Tricks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7Y-gmSIR90&feature=related

Clarinha (Clicker Sheep)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKnSls3zz9A

The Box Game (Lamb Clicker Training)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXCtBdA_nuM&feature=related

Smartest Sheep in Granger County
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itk1macWvWQ&feature=related

So, I Googled the various hair sheep breeds and settled on Dorpers for their beauty, size and strength. While researching Dorpers in Arkansas and Missouri, I happened upon Vanessa and Abby’s Acres (http://www.abbysacres.com/). Now I have Mopple!

I plan to begin clicker training Mopple in a week or so using the bottle as a reward as done with Squishy in The Box Game” at YouTube. I’ll teach him tricks and agility as he grows up and when he’s a big boy, I’ll train him to pull a wagon as demonstrated at Marna Kazmaier’s great Working Goats (http://www.workinggoats.com/) site. If that goes well, perhaps I can drive him to my goat cart. We’ll see!

Bonus post: Bottle Feeding Basics with Lyn Brown

2009-07-11T08:02:00.000-05:00

Mopple is a smart little lamb! By his third feeding he was nursing like a champ. He’s taking four ounces per feeding and wants more. He’s a husky little guy and would overeat; this can lead to enterotoxemia (www.sheepandgoat.com/articles/overeat.html), so we’ll have to monitor his intake, though we’ll move up to five ounces tonight when we go back to feeding at four-hour intervals.

California Red sheep (www.caredsheep.com) breeder Lyn Brown of Shear Perfection Ranch (www.nmredsheep.meridian1.net) in LaPlata, New Mexico, donated the following bottle feeding information for Hobby Farms Sheep and she’s allowed me to reprint it many times since then. If you’ve never raised a lamb or kid but want to, print this out and save it. The information is priceless!

Bottle Feeding Lambs with Lyn Brown

"What I usually do to get my new lambs started is sit with my legs crossed, tuck the lamb in the middle in a sitting position (front legs straight and butt on ground). I cup my left hand under the lamb's jaw and open the mouth and insert the nipple with the right hand; once the nipple is in the mouth, I balance and steady the nipple with the left hand that is still under the jaw.

"In other words, I keep the bottle and nose aligned so that the lamb doesn't spit or move the nipple to the side or back of the mouth. I elevate the bottle with the right hand only enough to avoid the lamb sucking air. In this position, you can feel the lamb's throat with the heel of your hand, and you know if it is swallowing.

"If you elevate the bottle too much, the milk can pour into the mouth, and if the lamb were not swallowing, the milk could enter the lungs. I try to keep the bottle as level as possible while keeping milk in the bottle cap and nipple. Of course, that means the more the bottle empties, the more tilt there needs to be.

"Most people kill their first bottle baby with kindness; they overfeed it because the lamb cries and they think it must be hungry. I know I did. I follow this feeding schedule strictly (no exceptions). If our lambs cry between feeds, we feed them Pedialyte or Gatorade. That won't hurt them as far as enterotoxemia goes and gives them electrolytes while filling the void for them.

Days 1-2 : 2-3 oz, 6x/day (colostrum or formula with colostrum replacer powder)

Days 3-4: 3-5 oz, 6x/day (gradually changing over to lamb milk replacer)

Days 5-14: 4-6 oz, 4x/day

Days 15-21: 6-8 oz, 4x/day

Days 22-35: work up gradually to 16 oz, 3x/day
At about 6 weeks, I begin slowly decreasing the morning and evening feedings and leave the middle feeding 16 oz., until I eliminate the morning and evening bottle entirely (remember, they are eating their share of hay or pasture by now). I continue with the one 16-oz bottle for about two weeks, then eliminate the bottle feedings entirely.

"By making changes gradually, you can observe changes in the condition of the animal and judge and adjust accordingly. Gradual changes also avoid the complications (some of which can be fatal) of sudden changes in diet. Whatever you do, when you buy milk replacer, use lamb replacer. All-purpose milk replacers and calf replacers do not work well with lambs."

The same schedule and amounts work for standard-size kids as well. We feed slightly more to Boer kids and slightly less to our Miniature Cheviot lambs. The only thing I do differently, since I’m home all day anyway, is continue feeding six times in a 24 hour period until the lamb or kid is three weeks old. To do that I tally the amount of milk Lyn says to feed in 24 hours and divide by six. After that I slowly decrease the number of feedings, still using Lyn’s recommended allotment of milk and dividing by the number of feedings, until the baby is getting three feedings at six weeks of age. Then we’re back on Lyn’s schedule again.

We don’t use milk replacers, though we did until we got our dairy goats. Some worked well (Land O’Lakes Lamb Milk Replacer was so tasty that I put it on my breakfast cereal!), some didn’t, but we find virtually every lamb and kid thrives on high-butterfat Nubian goat milk. If you do use replacer, always buy a high-quality, species-specific milk replacer based on milk products, not soy!

Another alternative to milk replacer is a full-fat milk formula given to me by Boer Goat breeder Claudia Gurn of MAC Goats (http://members.psyber.com/macgoats). To make it she pours 1/5 of the contents of a gallon jug of store-bought milk into another container, then she refills the jug using grocery store half-and-half. I used this formula for both kids and lambs in the interim between using milk replacer and buying my Nubians and it worked extremely well! However, since ewe’s milk is higher in protein and butterfat than goat milk, I poured off ¼ of the jug of milk and replaced it with a quart of half-and-half when mixing formula for lambs.

The secret to raising happy, healthy bottle lambs and kids is consistency: follow a schedule exactly and if you’re feeding milk replacer, follow the directions and mix it the same way every time.

We're home!

2009-07-10T16:51:00.000-05:00

Mopple is absolutely gorgeous: plump, playful and arguably world’s cutest lamb. I’m so grateful to Vanessa for letting me have him. He’s going to make a wonderful project sheep!

We’ve completed our first bottle feeding session and all in all it went pretty well. Lambs, especially lambs that nursed their dams for awhile, have absolutely no inclination to accept a nipple, so the first few feedings can be pretty much touch and go. With considerable help Mopple did nurse, though we all ended up with milk splattered here and there. We use a Pritchard nipple on a pop bottle and feed raw goat milk from our Nubian does, Latifah and Bon Bon. For the first ten days or so, since Mopple is a big, strong lamb, I’ll feed him every three hours through the day and every four hours at night. In a day or two he’ll be nursing like a pro.

He is, however, an extremely vocal guy, much more so than any of the Miniature Cheviot bottle lambs we’ve raised. Our big old Airedale, Hooligan, “protects” all the babies that come in our house; right now he’s lying on the couch with a pained expression on his face that clearly says, “Why doesn’t he shut up!” He will, but not until he gets over leaving his mom and sisters.

Vanessa did something really cool: she worked Delilah’s shedding fleece off of her back (Dorpers and Katahdins naturally shed their scant winter “wool” in a sheet that resembles an old felt saddle pad) and sent it home with us. This gives Mopple something to cuddle up to that smells like his dam.

I hoped to have cute outdoor pictures to post with this installment but it rained most of the day. These two not-so-great pictures were taken here in the living room. In one, John is scratching Mopple’s back—he seems to enjoy that a lot!

Tomorrow I’ll talk about my plans for Mopple, so please stay tuned!

I'm getting a lamb!

2009-07-09T15:28:00.000-05:00

(left) Here is a picture of Mopple that Vanessa took when he was one day old.

I’m getting a Dorper lamb! Late last spring I contacted Vanessa Murray of Abby’s Acres in Ellington, Missouri, about buying a bottle baby ram lamb to wether and train for agility and driving. However, by then their lambs were pretty well grown, so we made arrangements for me to buy one early next spring.

Yesterday Vanessa emailed saying they’d had a surprise birth (on July 7). Their ¾ Dorper, ¼ Katahdin ewe, Delilah, delivered triplets: two ewes and a ram lamb. I’m getting the ram.

We’re to meet Vanessa at noon on Friday, since Friday is John’s day off. She’s meeting us partway, in Willow Springs.

Today I hauled out all of my bottle baby supplies, then spiffed up the bottle baby crate and set it up in the living room. I can hardly wait!

I’m naming the lamb Mopple after one of my favorite characters in Leonie Swann’s mystery book, Three Bags Full : the food-loving “memory sheep”, Mopple the Whale.

Why don’t I train one of our Miniature Cheviot lambs instead? I need a large hair sheep to drive. Otherwise I’d have to continually shear my driving sheep so his wool didn’t get caught up in the harness. I wanted a Dorper because they’re so big (and handsome!). This lamb is even better than a purebred; he will still be big and brawny but his touch of Katadhin blood has given him a beautifully spotted black and white coat.

By blogging about Mopple's progress, I hope to show how smart and fun sheep can be (people who think they're stupid are sadly mistaken). Then I plan to write a book called Feeling Sheepish, much like the donkey, goat and cattle books I've written or am writing for Storey Publishing. In it I'll demonstrate the cool things small-scale farmers and pet owners can do with sheep, from harvesting handspinner's fleece to milking them to training one to pull a cart.

So please stop by often to check out my photos and catch up on Mopple's progress (and read the other things I post about sheep); I plan to post at least two or three times a week.