The pell-mell aspect of this process has been the
timing. Goat time (as previously noted)
and sheep time do not pay attention to the conveniences of human time. So, for all of the animals that we’ve gotten,
there has been an absolute panic to find adequate housing in time for their
arrival. The hurly-burly has been
complicated by delays in building our barn.
It is built, but not yet ready for animals, and given my work docket, it won’t be
ready until the end of April. It was
supposed to be finished in March—of last
year!
There is a sort of cascade of jury-rigging, where incoming
animals get shunted from one temporary accommodation to another. Our first animals were four goat kids. These were to be housed in what the previous
owner of our property had built as a dog run, but that had decayed considerably
and had no gates. I was still assembling
the gates as the Real Doctor was returning from the airport with the kids.
The next animals were eight sheep. The sheep were to displace the goats, who
were to go out to a childrens’ play area that had just been fenced in. But the play area had no secure pen to shut
the animals in (and the predators out) over night—so we were up until 11:30 at
night, working with headlights, hanging up fencing and plywood and a makeshift
door to fortify what we now call “the castle” for the goats.
The eight sheep, who we had picked up from farms in the Eugene area, spent their first night here in the horse trailer in which they’d arrived.
The eight sheep, who we had picked up from farms in the Eugene area, spent their first night here in the horse trailer in which they’d arrived.
We got a couple more goat kids, and we wanted to quarantine
them before introducing them to the rest of the herd. There were already sheep in the dog run, so
we had to figure out where to put them.
Again, we jury-rigged a structure built by the property’s previous
owner—in this case, a garden area surrounded by an eight-foot-tall corral made
of steel pipes from a closed-down lumber mill.
The structure was goat-permeable, so I spent a fatiguing day stringing
four-foot tall no-climb fencing over the steel-pipe framework, and erecting a
sort of field shelter that would only later acquire a roof—but, amazingly, the
accommodations were sort of ready the
same night the animals arrived! This
was cause for heady celebration.
We’d seen examples of field shelters that were on trailers
so that sheep could easily be moved from pasture to pasture. This is facilitates “rotational grazing” (which
has nothing to do with tethering the sheep to a stake so that they’d mow a
spiral pattern, but rather alternating a field’s grazing between goats and
sheep). So, last summer, with the
capable captaincy of the Real Doctor’s brother H., we built the Sheep
Housing/Mobility Unit, or SHMU—a twenty foot trailer with a shed, barn
flooring, a feeder and waterer. As soon
as it was ready, the sheep that had been festering in the narrow confines of
the dog runs were moved in. They were
very happy—they were still confined, but it was like moving from a monastic
cell to a decent apartment.
It was good that these sub-optimal accommodations were
vacated, because as soon as they were emptied, they were filled again with more
sheep that we acquired from a woman who was shutting down her sheep operation
so she could concentrate on horseback riding. Oh well.
Those are still there, because they have been bred and we’d like to keep
them separate from the youngsters.
The garden also got vacated, and again it was a good thing;
soon after the young does left to join their comrades in the castle, a pair of
bucks arrived and moved in to the field shelter.
Not to go too much into the details of animal husbandry, but
the Real Doctor’s plan for the bucks involved using them for Artificial
Insemination (AI), which (among other things) meant keeping them together (so
they wouldn’t go insane—they’re herd animals) but separate (so they wouldn’t
get—how to put this politely for a family blog—too intimate with each
other). So, hastily, I built a fence
subdividing the garden. The AI scheme
also involved taking the bucks to a clinic in Washington—still separated—so,
hastily, we purchased a truck topper and hastily, modified it to make the
“Goatabago.”
After the AI clinic, the bucks could be together, which was
a good thing, because that’s when the rams arrived. So, we kept the subdividing fence in the
garden, hastily erected another field shelter, and put the rams there. We’ve discovered that this is not an optimal
solution—fencing that is proof against 30-pound dwarf bucks is not resistant to
a 110 pound ram, and a field shelter that easily contains those bucks is not
resistant to two rams sorting out their dominance issues. I posted about this earlier; this is what
their shelter is like now. I watched one
of them spend a half hour on a sunny afternoon, patiently and methodically
using his forehead to destroy one wall:
If it weren’t my work that I was watching being destroyed, I’d be
amused.
So, we have this recurring theme—animals, good animals and
carefully selected, arriving before we are good and ready. Hasty accommodation is thrown up, and only in
the case of the castle goats, has their been any access to pasture. We have a
big field, about 11 acres, with really nice fence around it, but no internal
fencing. It’s a drag to try to bring in
animals for the night if they are skittish and have 11 wide-open acres over
which to elude you.
Now, thankfully, there is a fix to this problem. We’ve gotten some easily set up, lightweight,
powerful electric fencing. I moved the
SHMU, and spent a day setting things up, and now the eleven residents of the
SHMU are happily—and I do mean happily—grazing and kicking their feet up in one
corner of the field. I then spent
another tiring day mowing, stringing fence, making a gate, and breaking down
and rebuilding a field shelter. Now,
next to the sheep, contentedly munching on some brambles, are the bucks. I am, honestly, so happy to see these animals
out in the pasture, contentedly doing what animals are supposed to do, that I
find myself just standing there with them, smiling. This is real progress.
And none too soon. We
have two more doelings arriving in a little over a week, and they have no place
to stay.
Not much time for violin building I guess?
ReplyDeleteOh, that ain't the half of it.
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