Never a Dull Moment
It’s been a moderately eventful week here at the farm. It all started on the 26th with the very early arrival of twin ram lambs. We aren’t scheduled to start lambing until this week, and the ewe that lambed didn’t even appear bred. She also didn’t have any bag to speak of. Yet, there they were, two tiny ram lambs. And there she was, no milk, first time mom, wanted absolutely nothing to do with them. Ol’ softy that I am, I bundled up the boys and relocated them to the laundry room without much hope of their survival. One of them especially, the red one dubbed Crybaby, wasn’t even able to stand, and I’m pretty certain neither of them could see yet.
Their first milestone was living through the day. The next was surviving for 2 days. I had to enlist the aid of friends and family to feed them those first couple of days, since missing work wasn’t an option. The white one, named Linus by my great-niece (also responsible for Crybaby’s moniker), took to the bottle right off. Crybaby… not so much. I did convince him, however, to drink from a bowl. He wasn’t the best at it, but must have been getting enough that way because he started getting stronger and surprised me by finding his legs.
By the end of the week, both boys were happily taking their bottles and this weekend, they reached their 1 week milestone and even got to enjoy some fresh air and sunshine.
Linus & Crybaby getting some outdoor time.
It amazes me every day that they’re still alive. I’ve never had the best of luck with bottle babies.
On Saturday went to pick up these fine girls, having decided that farm fresh eggs is the way to go this year. (And to give the Hubs even more to do once he retires.)
According to a friend of mine, they are now Poker, Henny-Penny, Chicken Little, and Camilla. Don’t ask me who’s who, I didn’t name them.
We got our first two eggs, one yesterday and one this morning. They are… tiny. Never having had chickens, I did a little research and discovered what we currently have are called Pullet Eggs and are, by some reports, even more delicious than regular eggs. We shall see.
And, of course, Rebel had to check out the newcomers. I was a bit concerned he might think of them as a food source, but he seems content to leave them be.
On the topic of Rebel Kitten, if you haven’t seen the video of him disrupting my last training session with Jig, I’ve posted it below. It makes me laugh every time. I truly do not understand their relationship. Jig isn’t the friendliest of dogs. If you’ve read my blog before you might recall she truly wanted to eat Dillon when he was a puppy. There are times she still considers it as an option. Yet she and Rebel play and tussle all the time with no hard feelings. The Hubs claims it’s because, in his words, “They’re both psycho.”
He may have a point.
They also both feel responsible for keeping an eye on everything stock related and take offense to things going otherwise than they feel is right.
Here Rebel Kitten, Barn Cat Extraordinaire, is having a word with one of the calves.
I’m certain to be regaling you with cute lamb pics in my next post, and I’ll get more training related subjects going again because Jig is really benefiting from having her own calves to work and it’s awesome.
For now, I leave you with an example of how we handle distraction training here on the farm.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG0TZOMAq_o]
I’m sorry, I just find it impossible to watch that without laughing.
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