At long last, as of Wednesday April 3rd, 2024, I have the sheep penned up along with the bulls. I had been planning this for well over a month now.
It is going to be a pattern from now on, that once a rotation finishes, or I move the animals to the north of the field, they are going to go through the pen and get inspected and managed.
For the sheep, there were two big concerns with all of them: their hooves and their worms.
To look at a sheep, I first have to catch them, Moving them into the smallest pen, it is pretty easy to reach down and grab their back leg. Even the strongest rams can’t get away.
Once I have their back leg, I can lift them up and wrestle them to the ground. On the ground, they pretty much give up and stop fighting. At that moment, I can put a harness on their head and hold on to them.
The first few sheep I would tie their halter to the fence while I poked and prodded. The last sheep, I found that unnecessary. A firm grip on the halter is all that is needed to hold them.
In order to inspect their hooves, I have to flip them on their butt. This isn’t easy for me — yet. There is supposed to be some sort of judo move you can use on the sheep but I can’t seem to get it to work. What does work is grabbing under the head and one of the back legs. Eventually, the sheep will go down, and if I position them on their butt, they are pretty docile.
Only a few that I had inspected so far had any real hoof issues that needed to be addressed. A couple of trims is all it took except for Rammy’s mom. She had a gnarly claw that twisted. It was very hard too, but I was able to trim it back. She’ll be back in the pen in 6 weeks, so I will trim it some more then.
Inspecting the eyelids for worm count is pretty easy once they are in a halter. The problem is that I don’t have a lot of experience doing it. Some of the sheep showed signs of parasites — pink or even white eyelids. The St. Croix were doing just fine, though, with red or deep pink.
I started a spreadsheet to keep track of the sheep but I am not tagging them at this time. I hope that I can work the sheep anonymously, just sort them based on which ones to keep and which ones to sell and that’s that. I don’t think there is much value in keeping track of genealogy or anything like that since I don’t plan on being a breeder.
I have more sheep to process tomorrow, and hopefully I won’t be too sore to get it done quickly.