- Location
- pembrokeshire
thats sheep for you in fact most live stock we like to run our cattle through the race just to get them use to it but then when we tb test its bad enough there is a stranger there , but the reading is fraught they look at the vet and its as if they say feck this for a game of soldiersWe brought the lambs in for weighing yesterday evening, sunshine, warm,blue sky. The lambs came skipping down the field with their mums and into the pen, no problem, it was going to be an easy job !
Sorted out the lambs but a couple of ewes must have been crouching down and ended up in the lambs pen, no worries, they could wait until the end and we could let them out. First lamb walked into the spring balance, which was in the corner of the pen. We don't use a race as only a few lambs but once they get used to the weigher they almost queue up to go in. Isn't nature wonderful, aren't sheep clever ?...
First lamb, so full of energy started to bounce up and down so scale was going all over the place. This upset one of the captive ewes, who realising her baby was caged, shot across the pen and started head butting the crate, scale now going ballistic, only it wasn't her lamb who had tagged on her rear for a quick drink. We renumber the lambs at this time. How many tins of stockmarker do you have pick up before one that works, when holding a lamb ?
The holding area was put in by the previous people, probably over several nights as it consists of small sections of concrete at slightly different levels and angles to its neighbour, oh yes and the whole thing is on a 1 in 6 slope, which when covered in sheep excrement could be used as a summer ski slope.
The headbutting ewe did her best to stop the lambs being weighed, if I left the weigher door open she pushed it closed, or somehow was always across the entrance. Nozzles fell off the full aerosols, lambs pee'd down my leg or cr*pped in my boot. Hinged gates which had worked for years became seized. The weigher needed zeroing every time, as every lamb was now a bouncing lamb, but "we" can't afford load bars. The other captive ewe decided to do a headstand while sticking a horn through and round a hurdle. The weight chart fell off the weigher into the forementioned cr*p and pee before a lamb danced a highland jig all over it.
I am having a fortnight of meditation and tranquillity exercises before going through it again.