Culling The Flock

Man what a long day. After work I started clearing out the ram's paddock in preparation for the next stage in the fencing project. While I was dragging the limbs and tossing them over the fence I heard this loud BANG only to look up and see Frazier (Our terminal ram) charging and head butting the new gate I just hung full tilt. He bent one of the cross tubes and was looking like he was going to take the entire gate down.

I then figured out why he was is such an uproar.

One of the ewes is really in heat due to the lovely cold nights we been having. Nothing new about that it happens every year and so far the rams have never been teased so much they started tearing the fence and gates down.

No what got him so pissed off was the fact that one of the lambs either didn't get de-balled all the way or was somehow missed and he was taking care of the ewe that was in heat.

So it quickly became emergency flock separating day.

I hate flock separating day :(

This year there is going to be a much more drastic culling than we have had in previous years. I am getting rid of a couple of older breeding ewes that seemed more prone to the barberpole worms and one or two that are just plain too wild to handle as well as most of this year's lambs.

Quite frankly the flock is getting too large for me to manage easily and the couple of wild ewes we have make it just that much more of a headache when I do need to move em around and separate em out.

I ended up getting all the breeding ewes into the west pasture. All the new lambs and yearlings I am thinking about getting rid of into the barn lot and I had to move Frazier back into temporary quarters and use the new section to put the new not-quite-a-whether into a pen by himself....

Hey gonna act like a ram your gonna get treated like a ram.

He may just be shooting blanks but he is obviously doing more than the standard play humping the other whethers sometimes do.

Tomorrow I will move the breeding ewes out into the main pasture/hay field and move the yearlings/lambs/cull sheep into the west pasture where they will stay until market day next week. This will give them a nice buffer from the rams so there won't be any more issues in that area and allI will have to do is separate out the few from them that I am keeping. There is one really nice ewe in there I am keeping and we need four slaughter lambs for this year too.

Either way I still have two more separating days this year. Taking the few remaining keepers out of the cull flock and then splitting up the rest into their breeding groups and the non-breeding group. Then in February I will need to pull out the slaughter lambs.

At least the first major separation is done though.

Keep Prepping Everyone!!!!!!