I have a new ram. It’s another story why I have a new ram, but I do. He has settled in nicely from his short move from my friend Sara Jo’s place in Arlington- we traded rams. But two weeks ago, egads, I noticed a big lump on his front knee. I looked it up: hmm, in general terms, it falls under the category of “arthritis.” And can be risky. Sheep apparently can have big infections settle in a joint, there isn’t good circulation there, and it can get out of hand.
If it were a butcher lamb, I would have given it antibiotics from the fridge and hoped for the best. But breeding rams are valuable, and I didn’t want to have to get another new ram. As luck would have it, the vet was coming out the very next day to drop off all my ewe shipping paperwork for the “California order.” So I had her take a look at it.
First she took his temperature. 110. Whoooah. Normal is 102. Though the tough ol’ bugger was still grazing and trying to mount all the other rams, he was clearly fighting a raging infection. I chose to have her drain it and take a sample for a lab test, just to rule out CL (though CL tends to lump up more along the lymph lines, so this was not characteristic of that). It drained fluid-ey blood, which is also not like CL (CL is “cheesy”). We gave him antibiotics and she left more with me.
The lab results indicated it was merely a “gram positive” bacteria- something like staph or strep, which is just part of the environment and sometimes gets a foothold. I’m not sure how he got it. Though we did have a minor incident the week prior: I was moving sheep about for chores and weighing. I have a purposeful gap in between some fencing and the ditchline so we can get in there to cut blackberries. The resident sheep know the deal: don’t fall in the ditch of you decide to squeeze back there. And most of my sheep are pretty agile, if they do, they leap right back out. Sheep do descend from the mouflon, after all, and should find scaling steep heights a breeze.
But not the new guy. He slid down there and stood, shivering, in the couple feet of water. I waited, moved some sheep around, hoping to tempt him to climb out and follow the group. Nope. He was in that mental space that’s special to ruminant herd animals: well, I’m pretty much done for, I might as well just die gracefully. <groan> I sent Maggie down there to prod him out. He just tried to butt her. She bit his nose. He butted more.
I got a halter and lead rope, carefully slid down there and hitched him up. Tugged. No cooperation. I hooked my crook around his flank and tried to show him, look, if you use your legs and I pull, you can climb right out. He backed up. Grr!
I had to call Kirk, who was out running errands. He came down and pulled on the lead rope, while I got in the nice cold water and pushed and pulled and manipulated stubborn limp legs. And we leveraged all 200 pounds of dead weight out of there by brute force, and no effort whatsoever from the I’m already a goner ram. Sheez.
He seemed no worse for wear once I convinced him his legs and brain were still fully functional. But maybe he had a small skin abrasion and bruised up his knee, and bacteria got in.
The lab results indicated using good ol’ Penicillin G, which I had in the fridge. So ironically, I did not need the vet, though I could not have known that. His fever is gone and he’s as perky as ever, not lame, though the lump is slow to fade. It seems as though he’ll be fine.
But here’s the kicker: that fever will have killed all his sperm-in-manufacturing. It takes six weeks for new sperm to be ready to go. Perfectly timed for when I’d planned to be done breeding him. Ah, best laid plans. So I’m puzzling over my breeding spreadsheet, thinking of grouping him with a small set of ewes and letting him give it a try. If they aren’t bred, I’ll know by the next breeding cycle because he’ll mark them again with his marking harness and a different colored crayon. And by then, he should be viable. So, worst case, I could have some stragglers who lamb two weeks late.
Nature loves to throw a curve ball.
October 21, 2011 at 11:44 am
This is all good info. I have a lovely young ram, he and his ewes threw quads and twins in the spring. I am only breeding for meat. When will I have to trade him and get a new one ? Given that i am only growing meat for the family, not animals to show or sell.. Though I want vigorous lambs not inbreds. oh I know they call it line breeding but what do you think?.. c
October 21, 2011 at 11:54 am
Very interesting story, Michelle – thanks for sharing – such hard work needed to be done there on the farm … And look @ that gorgeous pup-dog in the background of the picture! ;o)
October 22, 2011 at 2:58 am
Poor dude! But if he’s that dumb, do you still really want to put his genes into your flock? What if all the lambs are that dumb?
October 22, 2011 at 3:10 am
LOL, hi Dawn! Yeah, that’s Bronte in the foreground, and you can also see Moses’ tail, he’s kind of standing behind her. She is hilarious, she is in almost every photo, always lurking around in the background looking goofy, checking out what I’m doing!
October 22, 2011 at 3:16 am
Oregon Sunshine, haha, well, I suppose keen intelligence is not super high on my list of selection criteria compared to many other traits. They only need to manage to stay alive for six months.
I think it’s a prey animal thing, that when they feel disabled and become frightened, they just lose all motivation to try to work their way out of a situation. It’s true of deer too, I know of people who have found deer just barely caught in a fence, and they’ll lay there and die just like a sheep will. It seems like it’s a kindness mechanism in Mother Nature’s design, that they are able to mentally check out in situations where they might possibly be being eaten alive. 
But it sure is irritating when they are only in mild predicaments!
October 22, 2011 at 3:35 am
ceciliag, everyone has different opinions for sure on how much you can use a ram. I think technically any time you breed parent/child or brother/sister, it is termed inbreeding; where looser connections, like cousin to cousin, or child to grandparent, can be called line breeding. Lots of people inbreed sheep, especially if you are just breeding butcher animals which are “terminal” or not going to be used to breed another generation. I had it happen once by accident and the ewe turned out really nice, I kept her and registered her. Close breeding has the advantage of “fixing” traits you like, but the disadvantage of maybe also fixing some you don’t like and didn’t know you had.
It’s more of a headache when you are hoping to produce some of your own replacement sires, trying to avoid breeding yourself into a corner. I’ve found some good articles on the web about how people do it in rare breeds- if you can afford to keep multiple rams, you can kind of “crisscross” over the generations and keep the genetic diversity a little bit wider, anyway. It can also help to breed ram lambs once at 7 months, then butcher them, so each year you are using a slight different variation on the same pairing.
I am starting to cross the line of having enough sheep that I don’t always remember their pedigrees. It’s been helping me to use sheep management software (I use Ranch Manager) because I can highlight a ewe and a ram, it’ll show me their offspring’s pedigree, and highlight in red any common ancestors. That way I can see how close I’m getting.
October 22, 2011 at 3:27 pm
This is good for someone like me who is interested in farm life but hasn’t lived on a farm in more than half a century. Thank you so much for sharing all this information, and especially for your comments about breeding. I hadn’t realized how complicated it could be.
October 22, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Maybe, but I haven’t seen this behavior in goats. And horses either patiently wait for a human to help them out of their predicament so as to not further injure themselves, or they thrash like mad. They don’t seem to quietly give in. So, this behavior is a bit new to me.
October 22, 2011 at 5:07 pm
Oregon Sunshine, definitely I think goats and horses have a higher capacity for learning. I wonder, too, if it isn’t partly conditioning though. That by nature, they are born hard-wired to stay with the herd and panic when separated or stuck; but over time, we condition them to be acclimated to being alone, to deal calmly with dilemmas, to trust people, etc. I have certainly seen horses and goats that were not worked with much that don’t cope with “situations” well; but ones that have years of experience with humans and a variety of stressors become good at coping.
And the sheep I have here seem to be that way- when I first got them, they were flighty. But now they know me, all the dogs, the property etc and nothing much flaps them. Even this new ram was pretty difficult to handle at first, but just working with him on his knee has gotten him pretty manageable.
October 22, 2011 at 5:53 pm
Thank you for your answer.. that clears things up nicely. I just wish there were more people who raised sheep around here.. all corn and beans unfortunately! c
October 22, 2011 at 6:02 pm
I’m going to hypothesize that a good portion of this behavior in (domesticated) goats and horses is also genetic. Often we selectively breed horses for intelligence. And as my goats came to me already grown (with exception of a doe), I don’t think the trust was learned for just whomever feeds them. They do seem to generalize, which isn’t something we really think of animals doing much of. Or perhaps it’s a learned behavior, passed down from generation to generation? You’ve given me something to think on!
October 22, 2011 at 7:56 pm
CF–Regarding the “stuck” sheep. This is not meant as a disparagment of critters ovine, simply an observation based on personal experience with them: sheep are hardly candidates for Mensa. TMJ
October 22, 2011 at 8:29 pm
Oregon Sunshine, I’m sure you are right, that intelligence is highly heritable. That, combined with a calm temperament that allows the animal to think in times of stress, can make a big difference in handle-ability.
October 22, 2011 at 8:56 pm
TMJ, LOL, yeah, poor sheep, they can indeed be pretty dumb. Supposedly they have certain bright spots in their intelligence. One I read about is the ability to recognize hundreds of other sheep faces, even after years of separation (not sure I could say the same about myself!). I don’t know how someone designed a study to illustrate that, but they did, and I suppose it must serve some purpose in their flocking. The other is mental mapping of geography- they really learn places, routes, locations of gates etc quickly and well.
Their brain-body connection when running as a herd is pretty interesting, how day old lambs can stick right to a hind leg of another sheep and mirror its every move with no perceptible delay. The lambs we have in the house do it too, they can be sound asleep, and if the dogs run by, those lambs will be up and tracking with the “herd” in a split second. Or, how the whole group can run through a narrow gate at full tilt with nobody getting bashed, they just flow through it as if the group brain “remembers” the width.
But I suppose that’s all “low brain stem” kind of intelligence, instinctive ability and long-term memory, as compared to novel learning and creativity. I would imagine any kind of complex or logical test that, say, a dog could pass with ease, I think a sheep would fail. They are easily befuddled when faced with thinking on their own.
October 22, 2011 at 8:57 pm
Aw, ceciliag, well, at least you have the online “neighborhood” and that’s a lot bigger!
October 22, 2011 at 11:54 pm
CF, thanks for the brief seminar on ovine intelligence. That, coupled with some retrospective, has resulted in an epiphany that there must exist a kinship between sheep and HS sophomores. TMJ
October 23, 2011 at 5:44 pm
[...] of my sperm-cooking problem with the new ram, I wanted to only give him a small group of ewes: he ended up with six. But some [...]
January 1, 2012 at 4:57 pm
[...] then, there are wrenches thrown into the system. Our new ram had a knee infection and a high fever, which, in theory, killed all of his stored sperm. By all calculations, he could [...]