Last November
we bought five pedigree Jacob sheep and earlier this year we managed to buy a
nice tup from ProCo a small animal care college near Wigan. Being with the
College he has already been named by the students and he is called Rambo!
Having a very small herd the dilemma is always should we keep Rambo with his
ladies? After consulting farming family and friends we came up with the plan
that Rambo should stay with the ewes until it was time to take him out and then
we would put him back in with the ewes at tupping time. This is normally around
November to get Easter lambs (sheep gestation period is 152 day or around 5.4
months).
After some
happy weeks with the ewes we decided in July it was time to move Rambo to the
end paddock. This was not an easy task in its self, but Andrew and Ray managed
to split them up. Rambo then seems to go into depression, to start with he did
a lot of pacing and then he seemed to sleep a lot. A week a so a go we had a
very stormy night and the next day on animal checks I had to do a double take,
Rambo was not in his field, the fences were not down and then I realised he was
back with the ewes! I came to the conclusion that human intervention must be at
play here and the gate must have been opened for him. However later that day we
managed to get the sheep in again and split them up, but to our astonishment we
then watched Rambo jump the fence! So back to the drawing board, we either get
deer fencing or is there something else we could try. Deer fencing is not an
option so we bought Rambo a ‘ram apron’ (I will let you google this!) but all I
can say is it lasted 48 hours, before Rambo somehow broke the straps.
So now we
have concluded that we are going to let nature take is course and have a happy
tup instead and expect early lambs. We are not a fell farm we just have five
ewes after all!
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| Rambo getting his raddle maker put on, so hopefully we can predict when the lambs will arrive! |
