Weaning and Whining

This weekend we weaned the lambs. And in our case, as in almost all our first time efforts, not only was it tough, we screwed up – this time in a downpour.  We’ve all heard about weaning, we all know it means that babies are separated from their mothers with no access to their mother’s milk, we all know it must be done.  In the case of sheep, lactating ewes need the break so they can rebuild their strength so they can turn around and have more lambs next spring.  All five of our lambs have grown nicely, all have enjoyed getting grain, and all have figured out which grass is tastiest.  In other words, their complicated four chamber tummies are up and running and can handle life without mom’s milk. So much for what my head understands. Weaning is a process. Weaning is noisy. Weaning is painful.

It is not an easy task to actually get the moms into a separate area from their lambs – the barnyard at the top of the hill. They pretty quickly know something is up. But we did it and about four hours into separation, the babies were crying, the moms were crying, I wasn’t crying, but I sure as hell wasn’t happy. Not since lambing have I been brought back in time, reminded of my own babies, and ached for these animals like I’d ache for any baby who suddenly has lost the comfort and sustenance of warm milk from mom. The nudging, licking and comfort we witnessed was gone. The crying was real and I felt so badly for the lambs and the moms.

So badly that near dusk, about 8:30 pm, I decided the lambs need to be further away from the sounds of their mothers’ call.  We had a full house, and everyone else seemed okay with the racket of pain the sheep were producing, but I wasn’t. On went the boots and off to the field with a longer portable fence, I set out to create a paddock further down the hill away from the mothers. The five lambs and four yearlings were easy to get in the new space because it was virgin grass! I felt triumphant. I felt I had been a good stepmother. What an idiot I was.

Ninety minutes later, in the pitch dark our daughter hears sheep screaming at the top of their lungs.  The lambs and yearlings had escaped my hasty fencing job and were up at the barn yard with a simple metal gate separating them from their mothers. Not a single sheep was silent! My immediate vote was to fold, capitulate, toss them in with their moms and deal with weaning another day. Todd felt we should stick it out and keep them apart. So, with the help of our daughter Kate we started to make a corridor out of the extra portable fencing so that we could just steer them through this long shoot down to the paddock I’d put up and that Todd had secured.  That’s when the rain started, steady, persistent, globs of rain. We were each on our task, in the rain, in the dark, just trying to make things right. Somehow in the moving of fences, a gate got open and Nash and Hillary, a lamb and yearling, got out into the yard – the backyard, with no fencing between them and the rest of the world.  The noise from all the animals was still deafening, the rain continued, the flash lights flew across the grass. It’s hard enough to corral a sheep in broad daylight, add rain and kill the lights and it was a small mess.

All three of us just did our jobs – which means we learned on the job how to do the job.  Todd got both errant sheep back behind bars, the corridor was completed, and slowly and indirectly all the lambs and yearlings were returned to the new, secure paddock.

Weaning is stressful on sheep. On new sheep farmers, too.