Therapy

In one hand is a bucket of pig nuts. In the other a bucket of ewe nuts. Tucked under one arm is my gardening kneeler pad. The mobile phone is in my pocket. If I had another hand I'd be carrying a mug of tea, but animal breakfasts always come first. The metallic scrape and twang as I pull back the gate bolt sets off the bleating. The bleating sets off the squealing and grunting. Wriggling weaners at my ankles, I throw pig nuts in the pig trough, losing at least a handful to the mud as nuts bounce off the heads and bodies now in the trough. Keeping the other bucket held high out of reach of Babette's greedy mouth and moving swiftly enough to keep myself out of reach of her front hooves, but not so swiftly that the lambs get left behind, I cross the field and throw the ewe nuts into the sheep trough. Feeding done, I do the round of water buckets. Watering done, I drop the kneeler pad to the ground, pull my hood up to protect my ears and neck from the nipping wind, pull out the mobile ready for a close up shot, plonk my butt on the kneeler pad, and wait for the lambs to put on a show. Bounce, bounce, bounce. A daily dose of lamb play. This is my therapy.

The older lambs, Bobby, Betty and Bonnie, now nearly two week's old, are the boldest, and their experienced mums, Babette and Babs, graze unconcerned, giving the lambs the freedom to chase, hump (each other) and jump. The younger lambs, Jake and Florence, really want to play too, but their mums, Bychan and Pascale, keep the apron strings tighter. Given that both are first time mums and both had difficult first time lambing experiences, their reluctance to "let go" is perhaps understandable. For the first few days after lambing neither would allow either of us anywhere near them or their lamb, heading determinedly in the opposite direction each time one of us came into sight. Hardly surprising - big lamb, small exit, long labour, hands in, messy birth, stabbed in the leg with a needle, enough said. Both have now regained their composure and dignity, so I can sit in the field with the flock once again, observing their behaviour, keeping an eye out for signs of fever and infection.

A game of chase

Pascale won't allow Florence to stray too far from her side, following Florence when she bounds towards the other lambs, intervening and guiding Florence away after a short play. Bychan goes a step further, not just following and intervening, but actively head butting the other lambs away from Jake. I've seen similar behaviour before, often by Babs if lambs of other ewes get between her and her breakfast, or between ewes when the pecking order needs to be re-established, but Bychan's instinct to protect her lamb can be noticeably more aggressive. The other day Bobby & Betty led all the lambs on a chase into the sheep run. Bychan followed and cornered them all at the end, against the fence. She nosed Jake, her own lamb, to her side, then turned on the others. All but Betty nipped round Bychan and got out, but Betty tried to escape by going through the fence, getting stuck at her shoulders. At this point Bychan turned nasty, continuing to butt Betty. Fearing Bychan would break Betty's neck, I jumped up to intervene, bouncer style, but Betty yanked her head back and out of the fence, and scarpered sharpish, going straight to mum for a comforting suckle. No harm done this time, but Bychan needs to chill out soon or risk being separated. And then who would Jake play with?

Bychan and Pascale turn to intervene as Babette, Bobby & Betty approach Florence and Jake

Babs & Bonnie waiting for the ewe nuts bucket to arrive!

Beginning with B

It started with the chiff chaff. It always starts with the chiff chaff. Followed by the cawing of the jackdaws carrying down the chimney and echoing through the fire place into the front room as they once again set about stuffing twigs, moss and general detritus down the chimney pot for their nest. Last week David heard the reeling song of the grasshopper warbler. A few days ago, as the sun shone strong and warm, I saw my first orange tip and red admiral butterflies. The white and buff tailed bumblebees are so abundant and busy that you have to be alert to the buzzing for fear of a head on collision. A pair of mistle thrush regularly have a noisy chest off with the magpies residing a few trees away, while another pair have set up home hidden in the tangled depths of ivy enveloping one of the ash trees in the corner of the sheep field. Their new neighbours appear to be the wheatears, but a more reliable identification with binoculars is required, instead of an "is it, isn't it" identification through two pairs of squinting, ageing eyes. I know the swallows have returned down the road at Pennant, but so far no sign of them here at Banceithin. I'm watching. I'm waiting. For swallows. For housemartins. For the cuckoo. For a lamb.

Lambing has been the usual waiting game, although this year the twin technologies of scanning and crayon have at least narrowed our watch and wait window to a workable two weeks as opposed to the long drawn out six weeks of lambings past. There is a pronounced path across the field in a diagonal line from the gate by the house to the stile in the corner. To and fro. Checking. Feeding. Watering. Last Friday, Babette did her usual trick of slipping out twins early, unseen and unaided, presenting us with two licked clean lambs at the morning feed. A ram lamb - Bobby. A ewe lamb - Betty. Babette, Bobby & Betty. A lovely family trio. 

 

The ram had clearly been having a good day because within the hour, in the time it took me to go back to the house for a quick breakfast and return to check Babette, Babs popped out a single and immediately set to work cleaning her up. Usually when the umbilical cord breaks as the lamb leaves the ewe, the "tail" left at the lamb's navel is short, about 2 inches or so, or if it's longer the ewe might nibble it shorter. Babs, however, left her new born with a two foot long, dark red, slippery monster of a "tail", as thick as a finger at the navel. Standing for the first time within minutes of birth is miracle enough, so to expect this lamb to do that with an umbilical snake tripping her up at each attempt was too much. Tap, tap, tappity tap on the internet forums ...... carefully tear it away at the correct length was the advice. Yikes! A smallholder is never too experienced to face another new experience! Pinching the cord tightly closed with one hand, David pulled away the rest of the snake. Yuk. That felt instinctively wrong. But a quick spray of iodine, back to mum, and she's up and suckling straight away. A bonnie wee ewe lamb with floppy ears. Bonnie. The miracle of life.

Second Chances

Myfanwy has had more second chances than an unproductive ewe with an attitude problem could ever hope to get if she lived on a real farm, run by a real farmer trying to make a real living out of the real farm. She's had the attitude from day one. Always the one refusing to enter the pen. Always the one when penned who jumps over the hurdles and escapes the pen. It's because of Myfanwy that we had a permanent high fenced pen built. Better that than have her break a leg, and in her time she has come too close to that for comfort.

Being unproductive came later. She had her first lamb, Ceredig, when she was a 2 year old. Ceredig was born without a problem and Myfanwy was a good mum. The following year she returned from tupping empty. That was the point at which many would have sold her as a cull ewe, destined to become a twirling elephant leg kebab. Not us. That was the point at which she got her first second chance. The following year, aged 4, she aborted the foetus nine weeks prior to lambing. A bloody tail. No great trauma. Outwardly no ill effects or change in behaviour. Myfanwy just carried on as normal, including the attitude. That was definitely when everyone else would have sold her as a cull ewe. That was what we decided to do. She escaped at the first sign of truck and trailer coming across the field to collect her. Weeks passed before she would once again go anywhere near the pen. And so we all just carried on as normal. That was her second second chance.

Knowing that Myfanwy could still get pregnant, I convinced myself that the abortion was the dog's fault, that Teri had somehow spooked Myfanwy with her erratic, lunatic dashing around the pig pens. So she got a third second chance. At nine weeks prior to lambing, almost to the day of the previous year she aborted the foetus. Again, no trauma, no sickness, just business as usual for Myfanwy. The second abortion made me immensely sad, for there could be no more second chances for Myfanwy. The continuous wet weather from November, through December, on in to January, and now February, has been proof, if proof were still needed, that we have insufficient grazing to support a larger flock. Keeping Myfanwy as a pet (with attitude) and companion ewe for lambs separated from ewes is not an option. Even if we could keep her, culling would be the end game as letting an old ewe with teeth incapable of cutting and chewing slowly starve to death is very much not an option.

It was market day in Tregaron last Friday. On a good day, a large ewe like Myfanwy could fetch up to £80 from one of the large kebab hunting companies that trawl around local markets in search of suitable meat. She didn't fetch anything like that. Not a penny. She wasn't there.

I thought about the money we could make from her. I thought about how I'd felt when we took Rhos and Lulu to market last year. I remembered that those feelings weren't good, not good at all. I couldn't reconcile myself to what would happen to Myfanwy after I walked away from the market, what did happen to Rhos and Lulu. This wasn't why we became smallholders. This isn't why we keep animals.

So it's now Sunday morning. Very early tomorrow morning Myfanwy will be going with two of our lambs to Tregaron abattoir. We will take her. We will see her walk in. She will be killed and butchered to our requirements by a butcher whose name we know and who we can talk to face to face about our animals, who will give his opinion on the quality of our animals, who knows what we do and why we do it. We will collect the meat. We will learn all there is know about how to cook mutton. We will enjoy mutton bacon for breakfast. We will make amazing curries for dinner. That is how it should be. That is why we became smallholders.

All we have to do now is get her in the pen.........

Myfanwy in the shed on the day of the birth in 2013 of Ceredig, her one and only lamb

New Year, Same Old Ewe

We squelched our way through the end of last year, and it's a soggy start to the new one. We have mud where we've never had mud before, including, thanks to the three amigos and Teri, in the house. We have standing water where we've never had standing water before, including, to the detriment of leeks and garlic, in the raised beds. Our best draining and only grazing fields are a sodden, sheep trodden mess. The tool shed has become a sponge. The solar panels have given up waiting and shut themselves down for the first time ever. The streams have over-flowed and receded so many times that most of the driveway stones must now be on the beach down at Aberarth.

  Yet as rain continues to fall there is much for which to be thankful. We are not sweeping water out of our home. We are not throwing out sorry looking piles of water damaged furniture and belongings. We are not waiting for receding flood waters to reveal the heartbreaking sight of drowned livestock.

  Our lambs stare at me forlornly from under their mud streaked rain soaked fleeces and our ewes have a look of resigned dissatisfaction at the unending nights spent sheltering in the hedges, but at least they're alive to be counted in the annual inventory required of us by the Animal Health Office. Completion of this paperwork every January never fails to raise a smile. We are required to count our flock and report back with recommended dates for inspection, being dates when we bring the flock down for clipping, shearing and the like. On most days of the year I need only stand at the gate and rattle a bucket to be able to head count our entire flock (unless of course some silly billy has got herself tangled in brambles again). But it seems that when it comes to DEFRA paperwork one size fits all, whether you're a smallholder with a single pet sheep or a farmer with a flock of 300. So once again I tick the boxes, dutifully submit the statistics of my flock of eight and await the visit of the man (or woman) from the Ministry.

You're going to have put your hand in!

Each year we learn something about lambing and put what we learn into practice by doing something different the next year.

In the first year we learned the signs of impending birth but never saw them coming, so in the second year we watched the ewes closely through binoculars.

In the second year we learned not to intervene too early but that it's easier to intervene in a smaller area, so in the third year we fenced the ewes into a small corner of the field.

In this third year we learned that when you really, really have to intervene, a small pen would have been better than a small corner of the field.

Other facts that Margo's tricky delivery taught me are:

• A lamb can survive a surprising length of time with just its head protruding from its mother's back end, including surviving its mother sitting on her back end.
• A pregnant ewe with a lamb's head protruding from her back end can still move fairly quickly given sufficient incentive.
• It's hot, wet and slimy inside a ewe's uterus.

Yes, if putting my hand inside a ewe had been on my bucket list, I could now strike it off. Lube or no lube, slipping your whole hand in alongside a protruding head is not easy. I feared choking the poor gasping lamb. I felt Margo's pain. Gently pushing the head back in was not an option as the birth sac had burst and the lamb had taken its first (uncomfortable) breaths. The Shepherding Helpline (long suffering but very calm and very patient Simon who lives up the road) advised me to get my hand in, find the front legs (which should have come before the head), and ease them out one by one. Alas, I couldn't find the legs. Margo was giving birth to a legless lamb!

Frustrated by my failure, tearful for fear of losing lamb and ewe, the first emergency call was made. Simon arrived within minutes that felt like hours. After a quick examination the second emergency call was made, this time to the vet. Serious stuff. "No one can come out to you" was not the response I had hoped for. "Can you get her to us?". Really? Seriously? With both Dave and Simon being indisposed at Margo's side and inside respectively, this would require me single handedly hitching the trailer up to the truck, dis-assembling the electric fence, driving the truck and trailer to Margo whilst simultaneously preventing Myfanwy, Rhos and Lulu from crossing into the delivery corner and causing havoc. And then we would have to heave a prone, moaning Margo into the trailer, and bump her along the lanes for the 25 minute drive to the vet. The vet might as well have asked me to take Margo to the moon!

Returning to the bloody scene in the field, I shouted the bad news over the fence. "We've got a leg out", came the reply. Hallelujah! Once one leg was out, Simon could soon ease the other one out, and with one heave from Margo, out slipped the rest of the lamb. Despite the trauma, Margo immediately set to work licking her new born and, after cleaning the remaining gunk from the lamb's mouth, we all stepped back to let mother and lamb bond. A job well done. And then out slithered a much smaller gunky parcel. Lamb number two! A third set of twins for our flock!

All three of us stood back and marvelled as within 15 minutes both lambs were making their first wobbling attempts to stand and nudging around for the first suckle. What a feeble species we are to take so long to stand on our own two feet and feed ourselves.

Elated, exhausted, relieved. And that was just me, who hadn't given birth, hadn't held someone down who was giving birth, hadn't saved three lives and helped the birth happen! But there's always next year ....

Margo with three day old Simon (the head first lamb) and little sister Simone

Breeding

Animal numbers are going up and up. If I include the bees it's probably an exponential increase on a daily basis now that the sun is well and truly shining.

Rhos and Lulu, the terrible twosome who survived fly strike, are very much still with us and making their presence felt by bleating loudly and planting hooves in the small of my back to express their rage at the discontinuance of lamb finisher nuts. If I go missing, look for me in the feed bin. Rhos will be dancing a jig atop the lid. As of this month Rhos and Lulu cease to be lambs. Rhos becomes a yearling wether destined for market. Lulu becomes a yearling destined to become a breeding ewe to replace the defunct barren Myfanwy. Both have to pay their way. Unfortunately Rhos has only one means of currency. His life. Sounds harsh but I have to harden up. No sugar coating of this particular pill. Don't look into his eyes. Look away! We'd talked of keeping Rhos as a comedy ram, the joker in the flock, a court jester of the paddock, but alas our grazing is limited and with the surprise arrival of two sets of twins, our flock size needs truncating. Pascal and Cadi arrived first. Babette's first ever lambs emerged into the world two years to the day of her own birth. As her mum, Babs, and indeed all three of our ewes, had only ever had singles it never occurred to me that Babette might buck the trend and pop out a couple. As soon as I realised that Babette had four more legs than usual I realised she'd lambed overnight. I don't know what instinct prompted Dave to look in the shelter, but it's just as well he did as curled up in the corner was another lamb. Babette must have exited at the sound of breakfast too quickly for the lamb to keep up. I'd like to see you being so swift when you're less than one day old!

Cadi's sunny smile for mum Babette

It's pleasing to see Babette being an attentive mother, keeping Cadi and Pascal in the shelter when the second and third days of their lives turned out to be the wettest, most miserable of the year so far. Babette has always been a feisty madam with no fear of us or the dog, so there was no guarantee that she'd develop a softer more maternal side. I will always have a big fat soft spot for Babette, our first ever lamb born on a sunny Easter Sunday morning. I only hope that motherhood doesn't mean she'll stop rubbing noses with me.

The arrival of the second set of twins, born to Babs, was more dramatic. Again, both were born without intervention in the early hours of the morning as we slumbered unawares in our comfy bed. Bella came first. A big bouncy healthy, but strangely silent lamb. Second out was Bychan. Teeny tiny. The runt. A toy lamb. Dave found her bleating plaintively, ran to the house, roused me from my crumpled early morning duvet mound. I know the golden rule is never interfere too soon. But the bleating was too much. Bychan couldn't find mum, She walked in the wrong direction. She walked into the wall of the shelter. She stumbled on new legs. She was too small and weak to suckle. We knew Babs hadn't rejected Bychan, as sometimes happens with the second of twins, because she was responsive to Bychan's cries, But what's a mum to do? She can't tell Bychan what to do or put her on the teat herself. We were heading for four hours post-birth. Bychan had to have colostrum soon. Time for the bottle. Rush to the house, kettle on, open sachet, spill contents, try not to panic. Might as well tell a helium balloon not to rise. We coaxed her into taking a few sucks from the bottle, but she really wasn't interested. Should we let nature takes its course? Perhaps Bychan wasn't supposed to be. Half an hour break, cup of tea, contemplation and, as usual, a phone call to someone more experienced. The advice? Get her on the teat or be prepared to let her go. But it seems that Lady Luck is still looking down on us, for when we returned Bychan was quiet, she'd suckled, we saw her suckle again. Three days later and she's the cutest little scrap of a thing, taking the knocks from her bigger sibling and cousins, fighting for the teat. We take nothing for granted. There's a long road and plenty of unkind weather ahead. Life is a fragile thing but Bychan is grabbing hold of it with every one of her cloven hooves.

Bella and Bychan less than one day old 

Down in the Dumps

Rhos has lost his mojo. Does a lamb have a mojo to lose? Whether he does or not, he certainly struggles to raise a smile these days. He used to be such a bonny sprightly lamb, but he's never been the same since the dreaded fly strike, subsequent near death experience, and final indignity of being separated from the mobile all-you-can-drink milk buffet that was his mum. His eyes are downcast. His bleat is a pathetic plaintive "bleurgh" with an accusatory tone (or maybe just those with a guilty ear hear that). One Christmas when I was a child, Santa left a "Baa Lamb" toy in my stocking - a small can from which the bleat of a lamb emanated when the can was turned over and back again. There was nothing I could do to help this trapped unhappy lamb and I found the sound so heart breaking that eventually I had to hide the toy under my bed. I feel much the same now. Although this time it's a living breathing lamb staring into my soul (when he can bear to lift his eyes to mine) and shoving him under the bed is not an option. Even the return of mum and the rest of the flock from their annual pre-Christmas sex holiday hasn't put the spring back into Rhos' step.

In a bid to lift his spirits, and more importantly his weight, he's been given two multi-vitamin doses. is on a diet of extra lamb nuts, is restricted to a smaller area to minimise weight loss due to excess mileage whilst grazing, and has a bed of straw in the field shelter to encourage him to stay in out of the rain and wind. 

Needless to say we didn't come up with this regime ourselves and are acting on the advice of those older and wiser in the ways of the lamb. Always listening, always learning, but never quite making it to the top of the learning curve.

Babs, Margo, Myfanwy & Babette return home

Teri drives the flock back home into the field

Struck Down

A smallholder's life is not all sunshine, bountiful produce and skipping gaily through meadows (that's just on a Tuesday). If you keep animals it's your responsibility to keep them healthy. When you lack Dr Dolittle's conversational skills, keeping animals healthy can sometimes be a struggle, and if we're talking cats and pills, pigs and needles or sheep and anything, that struggle can quickly escalate into a battle of both wills and bodies.

As any pet owner knows, doling out fistfuls of cash for worming pills, flea treatments and annual booster injections is the price you pay for affection, loyalty and companionship (and in the case of two out of our three cats all are grudgingly given, accompanied by the swipe of a claw-laden paw or not on offer in the first place). Add chickens, pigs and sheep in to the mix and the cash (yours for them) increases while the affection (theirs for you) decreases. Actually, to be fair, in our experience pigs are the least troublesome animal health-wise as long as they're fed and watered and have company and plenty of rooting and playing space. Understandably, given the size and weight of a healthy 6 month old sow, if play or food envy gets overly boisterous there can be injuries. This is usually nothing more harmful than a scratched ear, but having once been called upon to administer an anti-inflammatory injection I can confirm that the skin of a porcine posterior is not easily pierced.

In contrast, when caring for chickens you can find yourself engaged in some rather strange and sometimes icky tasks - dripping drops in a pus oozing eye, wiping blocked snotty nostrils, clipping solidified poo from bottom feathers, gently massaging a swollen balloon like abdomen, dabbing soothing cream on pecked parts, providing warm baths and blow drys (I can tell by the low level cluck, cluck, clucking in my ear that they LOVE a trip to the hen salon).

Which brings us to sheep.

I love my ewes. I know their individual characters. I recognise their faces. I've looked deep into Babette's eyes and seen myself reflected back. Given the effort that goes into keeping the girls tickety-boo I choose to take the head butts, stamping and occasional hoof to the back of the leg as signs of affection and gratitude. Recent events, however, have made me see the seemingly endless folding, tipping, trimming, dagging, fluking and dosing as enjoyable tasks, tasks I would gladly repeat ad infinitum if someone, anyone, would promise that we would never ever have to deal with fly strike again. I thought "tax returns" were the scariest two words in my life, but not any more. The "fly" is the blow fly. The strike is its offspring hatching out in moist, warm wool and then munching their way into the flesh of your sheep. Hideous, Horrific. Horrendous. And other "h" words that fail to convey quite how awful fly strike is. Try this instead: "Eggs hatch within 24 hours and first stage larvae penetrate the skin using their hook like mouthparts and secrete enzymes which liquefy and digest the tissue. Larvae are very active and cause further skin and muscle liquefaction with secondary bacterial infection as they develop". Have I put you off your food yet? Don't worry, there are no photos to accompany this. Well, no "during" photos anyway.

In June we cried wolf - the signs of fly strike in Myfanwy which induced panicked calls for help turned out to be nothing more than grumpy, hot and bothered, out of sorts behaviour. So the next time we saw the same behaviour we were less quick to react. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and hindsight tells me that this is where we should have intervened. Meanwhile, without the benefit of hindsight, we let ourselves be distracted by the development of a limp. Nothing unusual, easily treated, and hiding the real problem. When the hanging back from the flock, lurking in the shed and back nibbling started, Rhos and Lulu were rounded up for inspection. Suspecting fly strike, but never having seen fly strike before, I expected to see maggots in the fleece. No maggots. Lots of crusty scabby skin, but no maggots on the back of either lamb. So not fly strike then. With only three days to go until the one way trip to the abattoir, an insecticide dosing was not an option. A day later and the situation hasn't improved. Both lambs were reluctant to move, with Rhos only dragging himself to his feet to run when approached. Knowing that sheep have a blind spot immediately behind them, I even got down on all fours to crawl up behind him and inspect his back, but still failed to see any sign of writhing maggots in the fleece. Mystified, we called for help. Something was desperately wrong but we didn't know what or how to treat it.

Help arrived the next day, with his dog (a proper working one not our fake one). Being at work all I could do was wait for the phone to ring with news and moan and wail at anyone who would listen. I didn't have to wait too long. The diagnosis was in, fly strike confirmed, Rhos in a bad way, another day's delay and that would probably have been his last. We'd been looking in the wrong place, the fly strike was on the flanks, down to the belly, great handfuls of maggot riddled fleece falling away exposing bloody eaten flesh. Oh the guilt, the "why didn't we do x when we saw y" self-recriminations. Liberal spraying with huge doses of insecticide, isolation from the flock, the bleating and wailing, followed by daily, then every other day, then weekly inspections for re-strike, lifting off scabbed dead skin, smearing with protective and anti-septic cream. For weeks Rhos was blue with insecticide and yellow with cream, a brightly coloured sorry looking specimen, but alive. And here he is now .....

... still a little yellow and crusty at the rear, but I'm pretty sure there's a smile back on his face. The fleece is gradually growing back, the first soft downy regrowth masked the track marks left by the maggots. Lulu was never as bad, the fly strike was caught early. But neither will be heading for the abattoir any time soon, if at all. Any "real" farmer would laugh, any "real" farmer would know this isn't a financially viable way to run a smallholding, but there's something about bringing an animal back from the brink of death that makes it harder to then send it to its death. Nonsensical. Soft-hearted. Sign of a g guilty conscience. But one thing's for sure, we never want any of our flock to suffer fly strike ever again.

Lassie & the Lambs

It’s hard to watch your kids grow up so fast knowing that one day soon you’ll be eating them with mint sauce. I know there’s no room for sentimentality on a smallholding run by carnivores, and I know naming your food is not a wise move for anyone, never mind a softie who even now wells up at the memory of a traumatic tear-fest of a journey over a year ago when I witnessed a squirrel getting his back leg squished by the car in front. Knowing all this and more, I still can’t help myself. A lamb by any other name would taste as sweet.

When last I blogged my boys were newly born and yet as I write the end is now nigh for Alan and Ceredig. That’s the harsh reality of life on a smallholding. Even so, I was kind of hoping that by now they would have grown into anonymous, characterless sheep, indistinguishable from any other Tom, Dick or Flossie roaming the fields in these parts, sheep whose absence will not be missed. Growing they are – Alan is about to overtake his mother in height and width; characterless they are not. Ceredig is the shy silent type, a handsome ram lamb with long blond lashes who rarely strays far from his mother’s side, and who is usually the loser in the head barging battle of the feeding trough.

Alan is a big, boisterous bruiser of a ram lamb, given to bounding around with Babette, mounting his mother (despite lacking the wherewithal) and generally getting into all sorts of trouble, including the kind of trouble that would end with a lamb joining the great flock in the sky before his time were it not for the quick thinking of Teri “just call me Lassie” Pickworth.

Now there is nothing unusual in Teri disappearing to pass the time of day with the pigs (goodness only knows what they find to talk about but as far as I can tell it usually ends in an argument). What is unusual is Teri re-appearing in a state of high agitation, barking, whining, refusing to be calmed down or distracted by a proffered ball or stick. This was a full on “boy trapped down a well” Lassie impersonation worthy of an audition on “Britain Thinks It’s Got Talent (But Not Really)”. Feeling just a little foolish for falling for this performance, Dave headed up to the field only to discover that just about everyone up there was stressed out – pigs screaming, ewes bleating, lambs wailing. And the cause of this commotion? Why Alan, of course! There he was, eyes bulging, haring hither and thither, dragging behind him the electric fence battery box, the strap of which was tightly wound around his neck. The more he ran, the tighter it got. Who knows what naughtiness with his partner in crime Babette got him into that situation, but there wasn’t a moment to lose if he was to be saved. Whispered words of calm from Dave brought poor Alan to a stand still just long enough for Dave to grasp the strap and free a relieved, gasping Alan, who ran straight to mum for a reassuring nuzzle and guzzle. But this is a lamb who doesn’t learn from his mistakes. Just days later he appeared for breakfast with a missing horn and a bleeding hole in his head that was already providing breakfast for feasting flies and ticks – yuk yuk yukkity yuk! This time it was my turn to mount a solo rescue operation involving cotton wool, surgical spirit, tweezers, anti-biotic spray and insecticide. Bribing the flock with treats to get them all into the pen was easy. Catching, holding and treating Alan was a tad trickier. Nothing is easy to do when you have an upturned, wriggling brute of a lamb wedged between your knees and you’re being buffeted and barged from all sides by his flock mates, each of whom is torn between greed (for the tasty nuts) and fear (of being next in line for a tipping). Alan survived yet another scrape, though not quite unscathed as he now has one stubby horn and one pointy horn!

What Alan and Ceredig don’t know, but we do, is that their play mate Babette will not be joining them on their final journey. A feisty character, a knack for flirting and the virtue of being a ewe lamb not a ram lamb (and no small amount of pleading on my part) have saved her from the chop. She gets to grow up and be a mummy too. If I’m not careful though, my spoilt little lamb will grow up to be a high maintenance ewe. Eating sheep nuts from my hand is being endearing, nudging and nibbling my hand while I’m preparing tea for the pigs is being a pest, bashing the side of the feed bin with your hooves is being just a little bit too demanding!