Take full advantage of this lull in the production cycle, dear shepherd, and don’t feel guilty. You’ve earned your rest. Yes, it’s true that you may have a little field-work to do now and then, a little hay to swath and bale, or an 8 to 5 day job in the local village so that you can subsidize the sheep enterprise. But, all in all, May is an easy time for those of us who have sheep.

To further assure that you won’t end up feeling guilty about these lazy days of spring, you might as well do some brain work. To set the stage, put the lawn chair, rocker, or hammock under your favorite shade tree. Alternatively, set up shop on the porch, being sure to position your semi-prone form so that it won’t be intruded upon by unwanted heat as the sun creeps across the sky. You wouldn’t want your nap to be interrupted, now would you? And don’t forget to call out loudly for your favorite brain food, i.e., a cold, frosty root beer, before you settle in. Fifteen minutes later, having overcome the crankiness that came upon you when you realized that if you were to have root beer, you’d have to get it yourself, it’s now time to turn on the old bean and do the homework assignment. The subject is: Accidents And Injuries To Sheep During The Off-Season or, Are There Any Health Risks In The Month Of May?

In case this has the look of make-work, think again. It’s not a far-out sort of thing, this business of accident and injury in the off-season. If your participation in athletics consists of nothing more than scanning the sports page regularly, you’ve probably noticed that a certain number of professional athletes incur injuries at times other than when they’re working for their employers. Toes are broken while the pro is racing to the refrigerator during a station-break, ankles are sprained while they’re playing pickup-basketball with the kids, legs are fractured as they slide into second base at a picnic ball-game and, sadly, deaths occur at high-speeds on land and water, with or without the influence of fermented or distilled substances. Fortunately for your sheep, you can prevent most of their off-season injuries if you will tip back, imbibe a healthy slug of root beer, and think through the following checklist as it applies to your sheep flock and your property.

THE RAM PEN: SCENE OF MANY INJURIES. Can you tell me why the most valuable sheep in the flock are the ones that have the highest risk of injury? Although the answer doesn’t satisfy either you or me, the reason is, simply put, that their value resides in their genes. And their genes tell them to dominate their kind, mostly be agressive behavior and, if necessary, by fighting. We must accept that just as we accepted the truth of theorems in geometry class. Would we want a passive, flower-sniffing flock sire? I daresay, not!

If injury does occur, why is it that the best/most expensive ram is the one that goes down? There are at least two reasons: 1) We have probably forgotten how much we paid for the other rams and, anyway, the tax accountant has depreciated some of their purchase cost, and 2) The most expensive rams are usually the youngest ones, who are the least experienced at fighting and therefore the ones most likely to be seriously injured.

CONTESTIVE BUTTING: This business of contestive butting is a carryover from when sheep ran wild, where the standing rule was and still is that if you’re going to transfer your DNA into the next generation, you must fight for the privilege. Perhaps we should comfort ourselves with the thought that vigor and a will to fight may be related to the lamb’s ‘strength of will’ to live at birth. Maybe that’s true, but probably not; only good records will tell us about vigor and survivability at birth. But, we had better not try to change ram behavior, because we may lose some hidden benefits along the way. Best we use our hammock-reverie to think of ways to minimize the risk of damage. Now that’s using the old bean!

Classical head-butting among rams is of highest frequency during the rutting season which precedes the onset of heat among the ewes. It’s not too unlike the preseason for pro athletes, come to think of it, in that it represents a way for the rams to get into physical shape for the mating season and it serves to establish (or re-establish) the dominance hierarchy. After a few days, they know who’s going to be on the first team when the season starts.

The least worrisome complication of this repeated trauma is the horn-like change of the skin over the crown of the head. It’s not totally benign, because infection sometimes lurks underneath that armor-plated material, and it may require treatment. In one ram with ‘infection under armor-plate’, the hidden abscess eroded right through the skull bones and caused brain infection and death.

Fresh, bloody cuts through otherwise-normal skin looks messy, but such wounds usually heal fairly quickly and oftentimes do not become infected.

On the more serious side of life in the ram pen, some rams are stunned by very heavy, head-on blows, but rouse up to renewed activity in short order. A few stunned rams have serious brain hemorrhage, do not brighten up, stand off by themselves, and die later on. Crushed bones over the sinuses may go unnoticed or may be followed by a few days of dull attitude and loss of appetite. Cranial fracture may be fatal, usually because of attendant hemorrhage into the brain tissue. Fractured neck bones at the connection of the spine to the head may press upon the spinal cord and cause paralysis and death, sometimes immediately, sometimes in a day or two.

PROTECT THE NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK: Newly-acquired ram lambs (and even untested yearlings) are no match for your battled-tested veterans, no matter how good the new ones look or how much you’ve paid for them. And the new kid on the block is at risk even if they’re not penned together. Here’s a cautionary tale that illustrates the point: a father-son team of shepherds brought a high-dollar ram lamb onto their property, unloaded him into a pen at some distance from the senior ram, and headed for the house to enjoy their root beer. Before they returned to the farm-yard, the senior ram had broken out of his own pen and leaped into the pen where the new ram lamb had been placed. In those few minutes that the shepherds were away from the farm-yard, the new ram lamb had been killed! That was a preventable death, wouldn’t you say?

Not all injuries involve the head and neck, nor are losses limited to deaths. Even when rams are closely confined to limit the full-speed, head-on charge, a lot of close-quarters butting is done at the front shoulder. Rams that come up lame after close confinement may only have muscle bruising, but other lame rams will have a fracture of leg bones or scapula (shoulder-blade). Their injury may be treatable, but their breeding services will be lost for several weeks or more, and semen quality may decline during the period of convalescence.

IS THERE A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF CONTESTIVE BUTTING? There’s no perfect system to prevent butting injuries, but a few standard precautions may help reduce frequency and severity of such injuries:

A. Single-housed rams should be in pens that are high and tight from both within and without.

B. Multiple-housed rams should be brought together in the dark or under conditions of low light, in closely-crowded quarters. Use an age-matched system, so that ram lambs, yearlings, and mature rams are permanently segregated into age-groups. Keep age-matched rams together for life, whenever possible. Have hay available so that all rams can eat after the initial pushing and shoving quiets down. When sequentially enlarging the close-quarters pen, do so at night when they are eating.

C. Although seedstock shepherds cannot purchase their replacements from a single source, that may work for the commercial breeder, and it may minimize fighting in the new environment.

D. When re-grouping cohorts of rams after the breeding season, repeat the close-quarters drill so that they can become reacquainted with less risk of injury.

In spite of our best efforts, injuries will occur to our rams. If we set objective limits to what we will do to minimize injury, we can then accept the negative outcomes without so much regret and fret.

‘CLEANING UP THE LOTS WITH THE DRY EWES’ IS NOT RISK-FREE.

Weeds and grass in drylots are valuable nutrient sources to which sheep can add value. Most of the injuries to ewes in this setting can be avoided by walking the lots and looking for protruding nails and wires, loose wire and twine in the soil of the lot, and sharp-edged harrows that have been parked there for the convenience of the shepherd. If the lots are designed for cattle rather than sheep, identify and close up areas into which ewes can potentially get their head, feet and legs entrapped.

When physical safety has been attended to, look at the plant growth in the lots, having in hand a poisonous plant picture-book from your Extension Specialist. Sometimes such plants become concentrated in the drylots. In the future, after cattle or sheep go to grass in the spring, clean out the manure and broadcast a summer annual before harrowing the lots. That inexpensive strategy provides competition for poisonous plants and other weeds, as well as providing to them a better grade of forage.

PROLIFIC EWES CAN BECOME UNBALANCED IN LATE PREGNANCY.

In the third trimester, prolific ewes come to resemble a barrel on sticks. The heavy uterus and the full rumen, when rotating around the long axis of the body, can develop such a large ‘moment of force’ that the ewe may be flipped over onto her back. The uterus and rumen then lie on each side of the spine, respectively, and the flailing legs cannot develop a countervailing moment of force that is powerful enough to rotate their body over into an upright posture, from which they could stand up. Yes, yes, physics is pretty dry stuff for many of us, but the high-school kids in your home and neighborhood can easily explain it to us. Or, they’ll send us an e-mail on the subject, if it’s beneath their dignity to actually talk to us!

Similarly, the tendency of a body, once in motion, to remain in motion in a certain direction accounts for the inability of late-pregnant prolific ewes to turn sharp corners without veering out, stumbling, or falling over. (That’s another law of physics; check with the teen-agers again). Wide gate-ways, commodious alleys, and rounded-off corners are helpful in reducing that problem. Because prolific ewes in late gestation have a severely reduced digestive capacity, feeding them frequently will reduce the hunger-induced frenzy that puts them at increased risk of stumbling, rolling over, and coming to rest with their spine pinned to Mother Earth.

AVOID DUMP-SITES AS YOU WOULD AVOID THE PLAGUE.

The message is an old one, and perhaps all dump sites have been cleaned up ages ago. Even if EPA claimed that, I wouldn’t believe it! That’s because, even though we’re now in the Information Age, in which words have become the pollutant, the (older) Chemical Age is alive and well. Dump sites and junk piles often harbor toxic substances that poison both plants and animals.

To the point, if there is a dump site, there are chemicals there. Trust me! Additives to petroleum products in or on machinery, leftover or out-dated agricultural chemicals, insecticides, fertilizers, plant sprays—the list goes on. If the sheep have been excluded from the dump site by sturdy fencing, score one for you. However, the fence will not prevent rain water from running downhill from the dump site, leaching the chemicals out to where the sheep can come in contact with them. It’s a good idea to load up the contents of the dump site and get it into approved storage, perhaps in a landfill, or turn it in at a toxic waste pick-up station. It’s a lot of work to clean up a dump site, and it costs money, but it will help to protect your sheep. As to the future, dispose of unused or past-expiration-date chemicals in an approved manner, as shown on the label.

And be sure to recycle the aluminum can or plastic bottle which contained the root beer!