Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Our Tup is cleverer than he looks!




Last November we bought five pedigree Jacob sheep and earlier this year we managed to buy a nice tup from ProCo a small animal care college near Wigan. Being with the College he has already been named by the students and he is called Rambo! Having a very small herd the dilemma is always should we keep Rambo with his ladies? After consulting farming family and friends we came up with the plan that Rambo should stay with the ewes until it was time to take him out and then we would put him back in with the ewes at tupping time. This is normally around November to get Easter lambs (sheep gestation period is 152 day or around 5.4 months).  

After some happy weeks with the ewes we decided in July it was time to move Rambo to the end paddock. This was not an easy task in its self, but Andrew and Ray managed to split them up. Rambo then seems to go into depression, to start with he did a lot of pacing and then he seemed to sleep a lot. A week a so a go we had a very stormy night and the next day on animal checks I had to do a double take, Rambo was not in his field, the fences were not down and then I realised he was back with the ewes! I came to the conclusion that human intervention must be at play here and the gate must have been opened for him. However later that day we managed to get the sheep in again and split them up, but to our astonishment we then watched Rambo jump the fence! So back to the drawing board, we either get deer fencing or is there something else we could try. Deer fencing is not an option so we bought Rambo a ‘ram apron’ (I will let you google this!) but all I can say is it lasted 48 hours, before Rambo somehow broke the straps.
So now we have concluded that we are going to let nature take is course and have a happy tup instead and expect early lambs. We are not a fell farm we just have five ewes after all!


Rambo getting his raddle maker put on, so hopefully we can predict when the lambs will arrive!