Quote:
Originally Posted by elmariachi
Hi Paul. We heard this great story and it sounds like you guys had fun. But what we really need to know is, why the hell did all of your sheep turn up red-faced and not red-a$$ed??  |
We had a Black Faced ram, but as he was new to the job and we didn't want to get to Spring and find we didn't have any lambs, we borrowed another ram with a proven track record. He was a white faced breed, so when the lambs arrived, we would know who did the business by the colour of their faces.
Oddly, it the experienced ram with either kinky tendencies or an eye-sight problem.
For those of you who don't know, when you put a ram in to service ewes, you generally put a harness on it that has a large crayon fastened to the breast plate so that when he mounts the ewes, he leaves a coloured mark on their rear ends. The standard practice is to change the colour weekly so that you have a pretty good idea when to expect the lambs.
We started with a red marker on the borrowed ram and left him to get on with it. The next morning, he'd obviously had a very busy night, but half the ewes he'd seen to had red rumps and the other half had red heads.
To bring the story up to date, most of the ewes had twins this Spring and many of those had one black faced lamb and one white faced, so they were clearly pretty free and loose with their favours last Autumn.
Paul