A Slow End To The Week

Where are the posts??!! I’m sure you have been wondering… well after a busy first week we are in what appears to be a little lul in the action. I think we are up to 18 or so lambs but have had nothing for a couple of days… all the jugs are empty signifying that we have had no lambs in the past 48 hours. I’m guessing that we had a bunch of ewes that were already cycling when the rams went in and now we are awaiting the lambs from ewes that only really began to cycle when the rams came into the picture… just a guess and probably not a very educated one at that… 

So here are some more photos and some shots of the last couple births (single lambs unfortunately!).I will try to get a video up as well… not so sure how to do that but I’ll see what I can do. 

Last word on Freckles… we decided that the end of the road had been reached with Freckles on Saturday. A full week after we induced her we put her down and removed her from the barn. She is now in her final resting place giving back one more time…. Every time we put an animal down it brings up the first time we ever had to do that. When we taught at The Meeting School and took over the farm management there we got a group of piglets our first spring on the job. We inherited a pig house and lots of great pastures to raise them in but apparently somewhere in the field or the house was a rusty nail and one of the pigs (guessing it was a nail but could have been something else… ) developed Tetanus. Like many areas all over New England and the country the number of vets that attend to “food” animals, larger animals like pigs and sheep and cows, were few and far between in that area of New Hampshire. 

So we had a fellow faculty member who had a small rifle, a .22 caliber that he offered for us to use to put the pig down. Not having done that before I told him I would prefer he do it but I would like to call the vet and just get confirmation that how I was planning to do the job would be effective. So I called a vet that I found in the phone book and explained my situation. He was not only not very helpful but was actually incredulous that I was planning on disposing of this animal in the manner I had chosen. I think the words he used were barbaric and primitive… he said that “we have better ways to do that kind of thing now”. I was new to the game at that point but still managed to hold my ground in asserting that we were comfortable putting the animal down and we would seek input elsewhere. 

I have often looked back and wondered how that man could have been so offended by my plan. Who would it have been better for if we had loaded that pig up, taken it in the back of the pick-up to the vet and then paid about $60 for “the shot”? As opposed to a quick and instant death right there in the field surrounded by all it had ever known..? Still makes no sense to me; for the same reasons that I wish we could manage to get a mobile slaughter house in this state… worst part of the whole scene around here is the day we have to load up and transport animals that have never been off the pasture. At any rate Freckles was in the barn eating some hay one minute, gone the next.