I got to thinking today and it occurred to me that yall might be interested in this story. I have Mouflon sheep. Theyre a French breed and I highly suspect the word Mouflon is French for beautiful, yet crazy, flying sheep. Yep, theyre GORGEOUS, with caramel colored coats, large limpid eyes and the rams sport impressive mountain goat type horns that are prized on the hunting circuit. The ewes and the young ones look like a gazelle and a goat had a baby. Theyre also flighty as heck, which makes the fact that theyre a hair sheep and dont need shearing a REALLY good thing. Ill post a pic or two at the end of this. When we bought the ewes, they were living in a field with 8 ft fencing. And yes, they need it. They can actually jump six feet from a standstill. We ended up catching them by herding these popping, flying creatures into a small area with a tall fence.....then you had to TACKLE them to catch them. Hog tied and in the trailer they go (not fully enclosed and I was DANGED sure not gonna catch them again!!). Fast forward past the trading two baby goats for a young ram and eventually the spookier of the two ewes gives birth. I caught the ewe and my daughters boyfriend agreed to hold her so the baby could nurse. While he was holding the lamb up to the milk factory and I was holding her oh-so-closely in my arms, I hear uh oh. Look back and yup, shes prolapsing. Long story short but lets just say that a pound of sugar, a piece of baling twice and my lack of ewwwwww factor put her back to rights. She remained spooky, but her little ram lamb was friendly. The second ewe gave birth to twin ewes (we eventually lost one). Uneventful birth there, but something broke loose inside her mind and she decided that people were A-Okay. That got me to thinking....how much of their flightiness was nature, how much was nurture? So I decided to find out. I always intended to retain any ewe lambs to replace their mothers eventually. So I tried an experiment. When it was time to wean the little ewe, I put her in with my Saanan milk goats. Those girls are really like big ol white dogs, they love to be petted and to snuggle with me. And it worked! The now 9 month old ewe is just as docile as the goats, allows deworming, vaccinations, hoof trimming....snuggling...the works! So from now on out, any ewes born here will wean with her goat family, and Ill have a flock of manageable Mouflons :) (the first two pics are of some of mine when they were little, the ram pic is a stock picture, I evidently dont have any recent pictures of Jediadiah :) )
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 23:15:44 +0000
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