While I'm in a cynical mood, I'll touch on what we call patch shearing, or we here in Michigan call 'cutting them out.' It's a fact that we fool the guy judging our sheep, but the ones that we really fool are ourselves. We can make these breeding sheep look so good with a little wool on their backs, tail head, and rear end that we, as breeders, are out of control. The word "profiling" which is used so often today should be abolished and replaced with thickness, depth, and red meat. We should stop judging these sheep from the side and start looking at them from behind where we see the important parts. Plus, it sure wouldn't hurt to take a look at their front ends, especially the heads. To me, there is nothing worse than a sour-headed animal. I would hate to see it happen, but if we would show our breeding sheep shorn for even one year, we would all be in shock, and you can be sure that we would change our ways of breeding our sheep. One thing I know for sure, here at Buckham Farms, we'll never buy a ram that isn't shorn bare-naked, not while I'm around anyway.

While I'm still in this bad mood, I'll mention another thing that really upsets me: having so many of these important shows and sales so early in May. Have the founders of these sales completely forgotten the American farmer who is working night and day at this time to plant his crops? Couldn't these sales he held and the end of the month just as well when most of us are done planting? I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but the last I knew, sheep were considered a farm animal, and just maybe our sheep and some of our money might help these sales. One show and sale I'll be at is the Mid-West show in Sedalia, my very favorite sheep event. For those of you who have the time, I would enjoy talking to you about sheep or any worldly event.

I've been talking about these dead-head, big, lazy rams with no sex drives for two years now. I just read a report from the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station in Dubois, Idaho that have developed a test to help identify sexually-active male sheep. They go on to say that 15 to 25 percent of all rams in the United States may ignore ewes' mating advances. In short, they could care less about breeding the ewes. This is one of the very few tests that makes any sense to me.

We just had our annual wether sale at Buckham Farms, plus a very few breeding sheep. We have been doing this for almost 30 years, and it always takes place on the third week in April. While this is a stressful event, it's always sort of a bonding place for our large family, something that my children and grandchildren will always have fond memories and good stories to relate back to.

Many things have changed in those 30 years. Today, the club lambs are the main attraction. The huge crowds that we used to have are a thing of the past. I don't know how it is in your states, but in Michigan, everyone that owns a sheep is trying to peddle their lambs to the kids. Selling these lambs has gotten so competitive that I worry that breeders no longer have the great friendship and togetherness we once had.

For those of you who read the April-May issue of the Suffolk News, I'm sure that you are aware that we now have letters to the editor. I think that this is a great place to express your thoughts and opinions. These comments are always interesting to read and just make our paper more exciting. Like I said in the last issue, letter writing is a dying art, but you all have computers, so send them e-mails. I especially appreciate Alan Cover's comments about me, and I was happy to hear that he appreciated my ideas and old stories.

In six more days, I will be married 53 years to my good wife, Thelma. I've often been asked: how does one stay married this long when today most marriages last between seven and nine years as I have written about before. I'm sure that there are many answers, the first being: think long and hard before you jump into the most important commitment of your life. I think in this day and age, we watch so much TV with its crude, rude theme, plus today's music, puts chills up my old back. The hip-hop dancing where people don't touch each other (or sometimes touch too much) scares me. Another answer to this question is that one cannot buy love. All the gifts, candy, cards, and flowers in the world cannot make up for being able to tell the person that you share your life with how you feel about him or her. Today, how often can people pay each other compliments? A touch and the words, "Thanks for helping," "I appreciate, respect, and love you," are not so hard to say. Every married couple should try it.