When the sheep first come onto new pasture, there’s a bubbling energy in the flock. Some of the sheep seem to have the idea that there’s one perfect blade of grass, and they have to find it before someone else does.
Travels with Musti
Dogs, nature, photography, and the meaning of life, with apologies to J.S.
Posts tagged “livestock guardian dog”
I’m very happy to write that reports of Lefty’s demise were greatly exaggerated. Last night, Bravo was slow coming down for dinner, and when he showed up, his legs were covered in blood. The last two times this happened, it meant the demise of a lamb, and when I took an inventory of the flock, I couldn’t find Lefty and assumed that he was the third to fall. This morning, though, I found him in the field with his mother, alive but missing the bottom part of his lame leg.
I bandaged him and shot him up with some penicillin, and he didn’t seem too much worse off than before — he’d been unwilling to use that leg since his encounter with Bravo on the day he was born. My charitable interpretation of what happened is that the leg had become necrotic, and Bravo felt compelled to do something about it; the medical repertoire of a Maremma is understandably limited. Regardless, I don’t think I’ll give Bravo another crack at Lefty any time soon, but I’m a bit reassured that, absent extenuating circumstances, Bravo will probably behave himself with the rest of the young lambs.
Tagged: alive, amputation, bravo, gimpy, Hollow Oak Farm, lame, Lefty, livestock guardian dog, maremma, not eaten, Romney
Now that lambing is done, I’m starting to plan for summer grazing management for the whole flock. I want to get the two groups back together, and my first step was to test Bravo’s behavior with young lambs. I know he’s not safe around newborns, and I learned that he’s just fine with 7-week-olds, so I was trying to get a better sense of the changeover point.
I spent perhaps 40 minutes with him when I first brought him over, and he was mostly interested in catching up with all the smells that had accumulated since he’d moved to the lower field. I checked a little while later, and he seemed to be relaxed and gentle with the newest members of the flock.
I checked a couple more times, and all was going well until he ate Lefty. Not sure if he was finishing what he’d started (way too anthropomorphic, I assume) or just identified a weak member of the flock as a dinner prospect. Not so cool either way, and still trying to figure out my next move.
Tagged: bravo, eaten, killed, lamb, Lefty, livestock guardian dog, maremma, megabummer
This afternoon, Bravo decided to take possession of the new bale of hay I put out. I’m not sure he consciously chose it as his throne, but the sheep certainly took it so and stayed the hell away. As soon as Bravo got up to follow me around, the sheep came streaming back to eat.
Tagged: bravo, hay bale, Hollow Oak Farm, livestock guardian dog, maremma, pasture, sheep, throne
Bravo go to go on a road trip today.
I wasn’t sufficiently organized to realize that he was due for his rabies vaccine when the veterinarian was at the farm doing ultrasounds, so my friend Bob helped me load him into the back of the little truck and off we went to Walpole, NH. When I brought Bravo here from NY, he had a terrible time, carsick and anxious for the entire trip. I’m not sure what changed, but he seemed like an expert traveler this time, never losing his good humor.
While at the vet’s office, I learned that he weighs 89 lbs (less than I would have guessed, but still twice a coyote), is completely indifferent to needle sticks (a good thing, since I’m giving him booster vaccines in 3 weeks), and is utterly undone by linoleum floors (which left him trembling in fear). When we got home, he was very happy be back on proper farm dirt, and seemed genuinely enthusiastic to be reunited with his sheep. Bit by bit, we’re making progress.
The day didn’t start well. Bravo was acting a little funny — less committed to his breakfast than usual — and as I was walking up to check on the sheep, he ran past me and started digging in the snow. He explained the funniness a moment later when he pulled out a lamb’s leg.
I immediately suspected that I had gotten it wrong with #127, and sure enough, she had just given birth.
I think I missed the birth by an hour or less, as she delivered the placenta while I was in the pasture.
Later in the afternoon, I found more of the lamb, and as before, Bravo challenged me for it.
The lamb’s size confirmed that he was born at full term, so I assume that he was born live and Bravo did him in.
It’s profoundly frustrating to have lost a second lamb this way, so I’ve spent much of the day trying to understand where I went wrong. Ewe #127 had been in the barn with the other winter lambers since I thought she had come to the farm bred and was simply running a little behind the others. When my veterinarian came to the farm to do ultrasound pregnancy checks, she was the first ewe he tested; his conclusion was that she was pregnant, but only a couple months along, probably due in mid May. Based on this information, I moved her back out to the field with the rest of the ewes who were due to lamb in the spring.
Clearly this was a bad decision on my part, driven by bad information from the vet, and abetted by my desire to conserve my dwindling supply of dry hay for the barn sheep and to relieve some of the space constraints in the barn. The core problem is that I didn’t have a reliable due date for #127; this problem should go away if I’m even remotely observant during breeding season this fall. The more troubling conclusion is that I should probably trust my vet a little less. Like every new farmer, I’m a bit in over my head, so having bedrock facts that I can trust, i.e. the declarations of my veterinarian, is very comforting when everything else feels somewhat nebulous. In this case, I had a fleeting thought a couple of days ago that #127’s vulva was looking pretty swollen (a sign of impending labor), but I dismissed it since I knew she wasn’t due until May. I guess it comes down to Bill Fosher’s advice that animal observation is a shepherd’s most important job, and the things I see with my own eyes have to trump all other facts.
Tagged: bravo, dead lamb, ewe, lamb, livestock guardian dog, maremma, mistake, pasture birth
Since Bravo’s ear-chewing, ewe-chasing, lamb-eating crisis, he seems to have turned a corner in his development as a guardian dog. After the incident with the lamb, I tied him off to the fence for a week until I was sure there were no ewes left in the pasture who might lamb. Then he went on parole, dragging a tire around for a couple weeks to discourage him from chasing sheep; and finally free again when he’d seemed to burn through his adolescent idiocy. It’s now been about two weeks that he’s been unencumbered, and a real shift seems to be taking place. The sheep are much less skittish around him, so he’s not giving them cause to be afraid. Then I noticed that he spent the storm huddled with the flock rather than in his dog house. Now he’s spending his days alongside the sheep acting like a grown-up guardian.
He’s serene until something catches his attention, and then he lets loose with his voice-of-god bark. In this case, I set him off by taking a step to the left while standing 400 yards downhill from him.
Tagged: bravo, flock, Hollow Oak Farm, livestock guardian dog, maremma, peace, sheep
Bravo’s reclamation tour began this morning. We moved both of the imminently-lambing ewes from the pasture to the barn yesterday, so there should be no lambs to temp him until some time in May. But when I released him from the tether he’d been on since last Monday, he immediately started chasing the flock; he clearly needed some kind of supervised parole.
Bravo seemed anxious to show me that fences — even 5-foot electrified fences — couldn’t contain him when he first arrived on the farm. He was jumping over effortlessly, and digging under almost as easily. A number of friends with guardian dog experience suggested that he needed to pull something heavy for a while, until he developed more respect for boundaries. I was a little uneasy with this solution (cruel?), but desperation led me to get him a tire. He was strong enough that the tire barely cramped his style, but it did put an end to his Houdini act. I unshackled him after a few weeks, and he’s seemed happy to stay in with the sheep since then. So today I redeployed the tire drag, hoping that it will slow him down just enough to keep the sheep out of his reach…
Tagged: bravo, drag, Hollow Oak Farm, livestock guardian dog, maremma, pasture, sheep, tether, tire
Three days ago I made a passing reference to the brown ewe pulling a fast one on me, and then went on to conclude that she had not yet lambed. Veering toward solipsism, I decided later that it might be worth checking if the ewe was in fact still pregnant. Her udder was gone; she was clearly no longer pregnant, so where was her lamb? And so began a macabre Holmesian inquiry.
The week started with my finding Bravo snacking on the trailing half of a black lamb. I assumed that the lamb had been born the previous night and Bravo had done it in. I was a little unsettled by the fact that none of the ostensibly pregnant ewes in the pasture looked like they had recently given birth, or seemed distraught about having just lost their lamb. I convinced myself that their equanimity was attributable to lack of maternal instinct in first-time mothers, but this didn’t explain the absence of blood. Things got more complicated on Wednesday when Bruce crutched the flock: we got a good look at all the potential sources of the mystery lamb, and none looked anything like a ewe who had recently given birth, and in fact most showed no visible signs of pregnancy. The only possible source of the lamb, one of the Dorset-Border Leicester crosses, was very unlikely to have produced a black lamb for genetic reasons. I was almost ready to resort to supernatural explanations at this point.
When I realized that the brown ewe was no longer carrying her lamb, I jumped to the conclusion that Bravo was a lamb-killer twice over. It seemed clear that my urgency on that late-January day was well-taken but tardy — the brown ewe had lambed outside before we got her into the barn, and Bravo had gotten to the lamb before I found it.
When I shared all these threads of the story with Bill, he came up with a coherent and satisfying explanation that tied everything together. He suggested that Monday’s lamb breakfast was not a newly born lamb from the previous night, but rather the lamb delivered by the brown ewe in January. Bravo had either deliberately cached part of that lamb or lost it in a subsequent snow drift, and re-found it Monday morning. The cold conditions we’ve had since late January explain the fact that the lamb seemed recently killed, and Bill’s explanation fit with the fact that we couldn’t find a plausible mother of a Sunday-born lamb.
After convincing myself that I had lost 2 lambs to my guardian dog, I was almost happy to learn that it was probably just one. And I was enormously relieved that my instincts were somewhat vindicated, both my belief that the brown ewe was imminently lambing in late January, and that none of the ewes currently on pasture were close. A bad outcome from circumstances I was aware of feels less damning than getting blindsided.
Wednesday’s crutching confirmed that two of the ewes are somewhat close to lambing, and we plan to move them into the barn on Sunday. Today, to make some room, I led the brown ewe back to the big group on pasture, and she was received like a celebrity. Not every ewe gets to star in her own true crime drama…
Tagged: barn, bravo, brown ewe, dead lamb, ewe, Hollow Oak Farm, livestock guardian dog, mortality, pasture, sheep, true crime
Yesterday’s post was either prescient or fate-tempting. When I brought Bravo his breakfast this morning, I found him eating a lamb.
I tried to take the remaining half of the lamb away from him, but he snarled and lunged at me; I returned with a T-post to help Bravo understand that his cooperation was not optional.
Once I had gotten past the chaotic moment — lamb remains out of reach of the dogs and Bravo tied off to the fence — I tried to think about what had happened and how I had contributed to the morning’s disaster. It seemed clear that one of the ewes in the pasture with him had lambed overnight, and Bravo availed himself of the easy meal. I knew that Bravo shouldn’t be trusted around small lambs, but I had assumed that the ewes with him were not so close to lambing. In retrospect, this was wishful thinking, motivated by already having a barn full of sheep; I was hoping for a little more time to finish the current round of lambing before the next round began. I should also have taken the smaller incidents with Bravo more seriously. He’s been antsy and bored and taking more liberties with the sheep than I should have tolerated, but it’s so easy to let magical thinking creep in. Bravo had been showing signs of calming down and getting more serious about guarding his sheep, so I wanted to dismiss his recent behavior as a little hiccup in a generally positive trend.
I’m now left wondering whether I have a typical adolescent Maremma who needs more structure and guidance before he emerges as a mature herding dog, or if Bravo has taken some darker turn from which he may not emerge. His aggression toward me left me pretty unsettled. I’m struggling to operate with the clarity of hindsight while looking forward.
Tagged: bravo, eating, fuck-up, Hollow Oak Farm, lamb, livestock guardian dog, maremma, predation