You arise on a Tuesday morning, turn on the news, and notice the headline reads “All breeds of sheep now declared extinct.” How could this have happened? There are breeders out there to prevent this plausible epidemic from becoming a gritty reality. Some people are incapable of comprehending the amount of work and planning that is encompassed in the entire breeding process. Understanding the process will let you understand the determination needed and support those who endure the task. Objects needed for this particular task can become a lengthy list. One requirement needed is sheep themselves. You will need at least one buck and one ewe. A buck is a male lamb who still has all his reproductive organs in-tact. A ewe …show more content…
Before anything you will need to place the buck and ewe in their separate pens with their own tanks, hay feeders, and feeding troughs. Feed the animals up to the point when you will turn them in together. Depending on the time at which you would like to have the babies is when you should introduce your buck to the ewe. We like our lambs to be born in the winter months so they are ready for the upcoming show season during the summer, and most breeders also shoot for this time of the year. Given this situation you will need to place your buck and ewe in the same pen in the July through September months giving them multiple dates to breed. Before turning the buck in, you must place a breeding harness with crayon on it around his front side. Once the ewe and buck are together you will only need one tank, grain feeder, and hay feeder. This is the point when the calendar comes into play of keeping track of the date the ewe is marked with the crayon. Given this information you can predict the date of lambing based on sheep’s gestation period of 152 days. Once all the ewes are bred, or when you reach the end of September you are ready to pull the buck out of the single pen and place him in a separate pen. The waiting begins at this point. During this point of the year, all that needs to be done is maintaining, feeding, and preparing for the lambing …show more content…
As awkward as that may sound, there is no avoiding the truth. Say this time you have a breeched lamb. This means the lamb became twisted in the uterus and is now coming down the birth canal backwards. In this situation, you need to force the lamb to turn around to come the correct way, and after this you will possibly still have to pull. If the lamb has already begun its journey down the birth canal you have two options. Option One, force the lamb back to the uterus and turn them around. Option Two, pull the lamb out the rest of the way as a breech and try to save the little one’s life. You will have to make the determination based on the placement of the lamb. After the lamb is out you then go on with the process of getting them to stand and eat. When the lamb has ate a sufficient amount you can then let them and the mother be for a generous amount of time as you relax. This means you are still down in the barn watching to make sure everything is going