So, after raising sheep and rams for seven years, I got knocked down by a ram for the first time this afternoon. I would say it was my fault, but it was Harold who came after me at feeding time. I wasn’t paying enough attention because, well, I’ve been feeding rams twice a day for seven years and never been knocked down before.
Rams will come after you if you get in their space and they think you’re after their ewes. And Harold loves Maude. Maude is one of the two ewes we currently have, and I think she’s in heat right now, which tends to ratchet up all the excitement. Sometimes rams come after you just because they like you and they think it’s a game. After all, they’re called “rams” for a reason.
When a ram attacks, he will lower his head, back up half a step, and then charge. That’s when you should spray him with a vinegar and water solution, which discourages such behavior, or do what I prefer, and smack him on the forehead with a whack-a-ram. My whack-a-ram is a red bristled brush with a two foot handle.
When I smack Harold with my whack-a-ram, he backs up and looks at me like he’s real confused, as if to say, “That’s not how the game goes.”
Right, Harold, so just back off.
And he usually does. Today, though, I didn’t have my whack-a-ram with me when I fed the sheep in the evening. I was putting their bowls down and listening to a Dawes song on my iPhone when the world suddenly went topsy-turvy. My glasses went flying, and the music suddenly stopped, and I instantly went from looking at a feed bowl and some dirt and some sheep pellets in the dirt to looking at the blue sky and some clouds.
Then as I was trying to get up, Harold decided that since the first one went so well, he should have another go at me. So he did. Knocked me down again. He didn’t hurt me, not permanently at least. He did piss me off, though, so I immediately got my whack-a-ram, and gave him a good talking too, which he has already forgot. Rams have very thick skulls.
This is a picture of Mac, our first ram. He had several goes at me in the three years we owned him, but he never knocked me down. I generally try to sell rams by the time they are three. They seem to get meaner as they get older.
22Elyse Nida, Kate Panebianco and 20 others14 CommentsLikeCommentShare
There’s an old song keeps going through my head. “Mama said there’d be days like this. There’d be days like this my mama said.”
Mama didn’t mention this one.
Buck Henry, Winter 2016
Our buck, Buck Henry, has been limping a bit for the past week or so. It hasn’t been real pronounced, but he was definitely favoring his left rear foot–not putting much weight on it when he walked, holding it off the ground when he was standing still.
We figured we needed to trim his hooves. That is a nasty job at best, because of course the owners of those hooves never cooperate. They pull and they tug and they flinch and they act like you’re trying to stash them in a trunk. Add to that a hundred and fifty or so pound animal and one who has been walking in mud for weeks and weeks, but now that mud has completely dried. It’s like concrete. I figured we’d need a jackhammer. I was really dreading the job.
Then I had an idea.
Drugs.
For him, not for us. (That was my second choice.)
On Saturday morning, I called the vet’s office and asked if I could get a tranquilizer for Buck. I told them what I wanted to do, and at first I got the “I don’t think so, but I’ll ask the vet” response. Fortunately, the vet on duty was one who we’ve worked with before, and she approved the overall plan. So I drove up and got two shots–one to put Buck to sleep and one to wake him back up.
On Sunday, we did the deed. Vanessa gave Buck the first shot, and about three minutes later, he went into this woozy three-tequila fugue state. He staggered around for a while, loved everyone–Buck has always been a happy drunk–and slowly started dipping. Lower and lower. Lower and lower.
About fifteen minutes in, he’s on the ground, and we start working. We don’t know how long he’ll be out. Could be two hours, could be ten minutes. We had to guess about his weight, which of course determined the amount of the sedative. It’s really hard to weigh a goat with any accuracy. They won’t stand on the scales long enough for you to read the meter.
Trimming front hooves
Vanessa is working on his rear hooves, the one he’s limping on, when she finds some sort of strange growth. It’s about the size of a grape, growing between his hooves (which is why he’s limping, we guess), and it’s very fatty. She clips off the top, and it starts bleeding. And bleeding. And bleeding.
Then for some reason I still don’t understand, I’m down there working on his hind hooves, and blood is going everywhere, and I’m thinking, “I gotta cut this whole fatty-grape thing off.” I find where it connects, deep in between his hooves, but every time I try to clip it, Buck flinches–even though he is completely unconscious. This is not good.
So I do what I always do when things get really tough: I call Vanessa. “Sweetheart, can you do this?” I ask. “I’m not good at it.” There is a part of Vanessa that really wanted to be a surgeon when she was young, but that part of her got blocked by the part of her that enrolled in chemistry.
So Vanessa-the-wannabe-surgeon comes down and just clips the bleeding grape right off at the root. Then, we go from blood oozing to blood squirting. There was a steady stream, like a hole in a radiator. Blood was splattering everywhere. On the bucket, on the tarp, on the little bottle of rubbing alcohol I’d brought to sterilize everything.
Working on the lipoma
“Surely, we are killing him,” I thought.
“Pack it with paper towels,” Vanessa said.
So I did. And after about 15 minutes, we got the bleeding to stop, and eventually even got to clean and disinfect the hoof.
Then I gave him the shot to wake him up. It didn’t work nearly as quickly as the first shot. For the next two hours, the most common utterance between us was, “Is he still breathing?”
He was. Every time.
Later, Vanessa told me was a lipoma–a fatty cyst growing between the muscle and the skin. Generally, they are benign, but this one was badly placed. I looked it up.
Buck is getting better now. He’s still limping, and I’m sure he’s sore. He may even have a hangover.
