The Farm - Part Eight

Squirt the Sheep

Ah, sheep... We count them to help us sleep. They represent gentleness, innocence and sweetness. They provide us great wool for sweaters to keep us warm. Sometimes, they characterize that family member who has stepped out of line a little too often and gains the moniker of the Black Sheep of the group.

Some interesting facts about sheep -

• They were first domesticated over 11,000 years ago in Southwest Asia and then about 5,000 years later through Europe, North Africa and the rest of Asia.

• They were initially reared for their wool, milk then meat and skin around 5,000 BC.

• There are over 200 species of sheep worldwide today!

• Male sheep are known at Rams, Female sheep are Ewes, Young sheep are Lambs.

• A sheep was the first clone of an adult mammal. Scientists took the mammary gland cell from an adult ewe and joined it to the mammary cell of an unfertilized egg cell. This was done via electrical pulses and then the joined cell was transferred to a surrogate ewe. "Dolly" the cloned sheep was born on July 5th, 1996, and lived for almost seven years. She gave birth to six lambs!

Hello Dolly and well, Dolly!

• They can remember upward of fifty different and unique faces. They even remember their own names if you repeat it often enough.

• They've been proven to express many of the same emotions as humans - fear, anger, rage, despair, boredom, disgust and happiness. They can also sense emotions in people, and we found that they would stare at us for minutes at a time as though they were studying us.

• Sheep have rectangular pupils. That combined with the placement of the eyes on their head give them a spectacularly wide field of view, somewhere between 270 and 320 degrees! Because they are often prey animals, this provides them with early detection from predators.

It seemed like a natural thing for us to raise sheep. 4H loved them and they were very manageable for young kids to raise and show. We raised a few Hampshire sheep including "Squirt". I came home from work one day shortly after we got our lambs and found the kids watching television in the living room with Squirt laying on the floor with them.

Bottle feeding Squirt

When confronted, I got the "Dad! Don't worry! He's wearing a diaper!" It's absolutely no wonder why I went grey young.

Sheep are strictly herbivores and only eat plants, grass and hay. We fed ours a mix of long-stem grass, alfalfa mix, hay plus all of the grasses in the field that they wanted. We also supplemented ours with sheep pellets in a bucket that was hooked to the side of the wire mesh fence.

While sheep are supposed to be intelligent creatures, ours must have been at the end of the line when brains were given out. We would occasionally come out to find one of the rams running around aimlessly with a bucket on his head. Because sheep are known to flock together, we would often see "Buckethead" playing follow the leader with the other sheep in a row behind him.

While sheep are generally docile, male rams can become a bit aggressive if not neutered. Rather than having a 250-300 pound male sheep running into the side of your leg (which they were known to do), we opted to neuter them early.

Alert - avert your eyes for the next part if you're squeamish:

While surgical castration is certainly an option, it actually carries more risk of hemorrhage and infection than banding and Burdizzo (clamping). Banding involves putting a rubber ring on the male testes which tightens around the sack. After about a week, the testes are destroyed by the lack of blood flow and the ring can be removed. This was the method we used.

Some of the older farmers in the area were a bit more barbaric and accomplished their own testes destruction using two bricks.

Okay, you can come back now.

Our sheep were a popular attraction on the farm and on occasion, we would find strangers parked out on the road bringing their kids back to the barn area to see the various animals as though we were a petting zoo. It wasn't a big problem, but animals sometimes see fingers as food. We had our share of crying visitors over the years if they got bit.

Sheep are divided into wool sheep, meat sheep and sometimes a combination of the two. Hampshire sheep are considered meat sheep and therefore, we didn't worry about the wool except during 4H shows, when the kids would ensure they were as white as snow.

I would recommend sheep to anyone who is interested raising farm livestock!