Lambing Season – March, 2009
Jill, our 5 year old Finn ewe, looked like she was having problems with her pregnancy last week so we moved her into the barn despite the fact that she wasn’t due for another two weeks. Last Sunday morning I checked on her and apparently her water had just broken. Linda went down to the barn and sat with her. When I came by a little later there was a tiny, 3-lb lamb sitting on the floor between the two of them. An hour later there were four more, all five looking exactly identical with their mottled black and white markings. Linda put each one up near Jill’s head so she could lick them clean, but it was clear that the delivery had taken so much out of her that she was going to need to rest for a while before she could take care of her lambs herself.
Jill lay there in the stall while Linda tried to get some milk from her to start the lambs but her milk wasn’t coming down. So Linda mixed up some colostrum formula and bottle fed it to them. They all looked exactly the same so we had to spray paint different color dots on their backs so we could keep track of who had been fed. Meanwhile, Jill just lay there recovering – or so we thought – watching Linda nurse her babies. If I really believed that sheep had thoughts, I would have said that Jill knew what Linda was doing and appreciated the help. She just lay there quietly, watching everything that was going on. It was clear that she was uncomfortable but she wasn’t worried about her babies. She and Linda had been through this before.
The next morning when Linda went out to check she found Jill in a lot of pain. It’s often hard to know if sheep are hurting because – like most animals – they rarely verbalize their pain. But there was a really bad odor and there were tears coming out of Jill’s eyes. Linda had no choice; she had to put her down. But if sheep have thoughts I know she was saying “Thank you for stopping my pain and for taking care of my lambs. They’re yours now. Please take care of them. I have to go.”
After two nights of feeding the lambs every two hours, four of them died. We’ll never know why those four just faded away or why the fifth was still alive. Since there was only one left, Linda brought it up to the house and has been keeping it in a box so she can continue the two-hour feeding ritual without having to go down to the barn all night. Our four Border Collies have each reacted differently to having a lamb in the house. Maggie and her grown son, Skye, don’t seem too interested. Finn, the most aggressive of our dogs, can’t stop licking it. This isn’t all bad because that’s what ewes do to help raise their lambs. Katie, the youngest, keeps looking at it as though it was a stuffed toy that – like all her other stuffed toys – she’d like to disembowel. We don’t normally name our sheep, but we may name this poor little guy. He’s had a hard time.
Post-script: A few weeks after the last of the five lambs died.
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