Last Tuesday evening I noticed one of my ram lambs looked like he had a puffy lower lip. It was subtle, and the tired part of me thought, I’ll look at that tomorrow. But then, no, I’d better look at it right now. I called down Maggie to help me gather the group and nabbed him. It’s a good thing I didn’t wait.
His jaw had been rearranged, literally! One side of his mandible was broken, compound fractured, and the bone shard was jutting out into the middle of his mouth, pushing his tongue aside. The wound was pretty fresh, still bleeding, and with that soft puffiness of tissue that has ballooned up from trauma, but not yet hardened into knotty blood clots. (Curiosity picture taken post-slaughter, I didn’t hassle him more than necessary in his painful state.)
I considered the sources. The stock dogs? Caught in fencing? I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure it was a blunt force trauma, like from a sledgehammer. Or from this wether lamb’s head:
One of the Jacob crossbreds. Darn it if I didn’t miss a testicle on both of them when castrating them. They have the bad temperament of their mother, always aggressive and head-butting the other sheep. My Katahdins are so mild mannered by comparison. Even though I have a group of rams together and it’s breeding season, they only just nudge each other and grunt (and, ahem, they are seemingly more interested in possibly hooking up than battling ;-)). The Jacob crosses are the only ones trying to fight, and one of them has horns. And in fact, one of his horns has a messed-up end because he’s obviously injured the horn bud earlier, probably from head butting.
There was nothing to be done, a sheep with a bum mouth can’t eat and won’t last long. This was a nice ram that I had kept intact hoping to sell him as a breeder. He was shy of butcher weight, but not by much, so off he went the next morning.
The local butcher normally takes slaughters at the end of the day; I think for cleanup practicalities, they do it after the day’s meat cutting is finished. But they kindly took him first thing in the morning, out of concern for his discomfort. I don’t think giant slaughterhouses have time for this kind of consideration, so I’m grateful to have a custom meat house only minutes away from home. And I’m glad I caught this. Another day or so, and that lamb would have gone down and succumbed to dehydration. It goes to show, if you can spend five minutes every day looking closely at your animals, you can salvage a lot of things before it’s too late.
Those Jacob lambs need to put on another ten pounds or so, and then they are right behind him in getting delivered to the butcher! This is further solidifying my non-preference for Jacobs, and horns!
September 14, 2010 at 12:13 am
Wow, good thing you didn’t wait! I’ve thought of getting a couple sheep… I’ve read up a bit on Katahdins. I may just do it someday. I am glad to hear how you feel about them and how they seem so much gentler than most. I would want them mostly for meat and maybe to milk. The wool would be nice to ‘play’ with although I think I understand it doesn’t have good ‘commercial’ quality.
Question – I now leave out the copper for the goats to use free choice. So copper, goats, and sheep should be ok together?
September 14, 2010 at 8:54 am
what weight are you sending them to market at?
September 14, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Bruce, I shoot for 90-100 lbs live weight.
Michelle
September 14, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Linda, they are indeed super mellow, and most Katahdin people I know really select for good temperament and don’t keep ill behaved sheep in the gene pool. In contrast, I’ve heard people from some other breeds just state as fact that rams will try to kill you, and each other, and they have ewes that can jump 5′ fences or regularly abandon lambs, etc. It’s as if they assume it has to be that way, so they put up with it.
Katahdin “wool” really varies. Some of my sheep don’t have any wool at all, it’s all just coarse hair that feels like a broomstick. Others do get woolier in cold winter months and it sheds in big enough clumps that you could collect it. But my understanding is that there is so much hair in it that it doesn’t spin well? And they don’t produce it in much volume. But it might be fun for crafts and other things, weaving or felting maybe?
Re: copper, I dunno, I guess it would depend on how much copper is already in your hay and whatever else you feed- if there is already quite a bit, then offering them any extra copper could be a risk. I suspect that though there are plenty of documented cases of sheep dying of copper poisoning, that the actual population percentage is probably fairly small. I think what has happened is just that somebody loses a sheep that’s important to them, they make a big deal out of it, all the feed companies react and quit using copper altogether to cover their butts. If we view it instead as a population issue, then we’d be willing to lose a few sheep in order to treat the many with adequate copper (and over time, we might breed out the hypersensitive ones). But of course, it would be hard to view it that way if you just had a few pet sheep and one of them died from a supplement you purposely fed, it would be upsetting…
Michelle