Yep, trying to get back into the blogging groove here at Struan Farm, we'll see how I go. Thought it made sense to start with where we are on the pet lamb front this season. We have four happy, healthy lambs in the pet mob this year: "Poopy Pete," "Houdini," "Ronaldo," and "Clover." Two ewes, two rams. They are a lovely foursome. No scrums at bottle times, everyone gets along.
We had two other ewe lambs briefly. "Georgie," a big brown lamb who was adopted by a family wanting a pet for a local school pet day, and "Ruffles," who rather miraculously we were able to "re-mother" to former pet lamb Rosie.
Rosie lost both of her twins this year, one was too big for her it seemed. John found her in the paddock beside the dead lambs seriously upset, being a very good mum. We decided to try to convince her that little Ruffles was one of her lambs. Sheep operate according to scent, so John smeared some from one of the dead twins onto Ruffles. (This may be a bit too farm-y for some, but the old school way of doing this is to take the fleece/skin of the dead lamb and put it onto the potential adoptee. John decided to try rubbing Ruffles with the scent instead.) We also helped Ruffles, who had been drinking bottles for almost a week by then, to drink from Rosie in the woolshed yards. It was an experiment to say the least.
Yes, there was a happy ending, they walked off together into the sunset! We suspect that while Rosie had figured out what we were up to, she decided to cooperate seeing it as a "win-win." And I agree with her on that.
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