Sheep by Laura Kwong

Sunday, July 19, 2009

This morning I got to feed the sheep! Okay, so I’ve been taking the sheep out to pasture for the past three nights, bringing them to their food, but today I got to bring their food to them. I shouldn’t enjoy this unnatural order, especially since the sheep were being unruly, but I did.

First I turned on the milling machine to spit out a bucket of ground corn (a mixture of oats, barley, and wheat). Then I used the loped off top of a plastic bottle to dish a scoopful of feed into the tray where the sheep would place their munching/slurping/guzzling lips. After ensuring the gate to the feeding area was fastened shut, I untied the rope that secured the gate to the holding pen. The sheep filed out one by one (regulated by the narrow passageway), except when a sheep got too excited and literally jumped the line. The dashed and crashed their way to the feeding troughs and inserted their heads through narrow slots. As they did, the pushed down a metal bar with their necks that flipped a metal bar over the top of their necks so they would have to stay in the slot and keep eating until I let them go. It seems rather ridiculous to have to make the sheep keep their mouths next to their food until I decided they were done with the meal, but the few slots that didn’t have bars to keep the sheep locked in made the reason for the restriction quite obvious. The sheep would eat a few mouthfuls, then wander over to another sheep’s slot and try to get at her food. Of course, there wasn’t any room to get in, so they would put their hooves on the other sheep’s back of try to nudge the other sheep away. There was one slot that had no bar and fit two sheep, but the pushy German sheep, who ate a lot and ate quickly, would always try to barge in and take more food if there wasn’t a bar to restrain them.

The trickiest part was getting the sheep to leave the pen. After everyone was finished eating, which took considerably longer for the little spotted sheep compared to the pushy, big-mouthed German sheep, I released the bars that held their necks down and opened the gate to the outside. The problem was that the sheep, not accustomed to my presence, where quite scared to enter the three foot radius around me and wouldn’t come through the gate when I opened it. I had to prop the gate open and move to the back of the pen, scaring all the sheep to dart in front of me, before I could turn around and shoo them out. By this time the sheep that were already outside had pushed their way through the secondary gate and some were coming in the gate that I was trying to push the other sheep out of. Ay! Exo, exo! Exo! I yelled and sometimes gave the sheep a little tap on the back to get them going. After Andy discovered that I still hadn’t fed all the sheep, he told me that I was supposed to both the gates and then release the sheep from the feeding troughs. This may have helped a bit, but I don’t see how it would prevent the other sheep from coming back in. They would probably only have stopped making trouble if I had given them some water, which I didn’t really have time to do because I was filling feed troughs, trying to prevent a sheep that was caught sideways in the shoot of the holding pen from being torn in two, and dealing with sheep that were pushing their way back into the feeding area. Andy had made it look so easy! What an experience.