Shearing Sheep

As I mentioned in my last post, we bought 3 sheep a few months ago.  I went vaguely through the process of slaughtering and butchering and tanning the sheepskin from our wether Lamb Chop.  But what about the other two?

Miss Eight offering Nibbles some treats.

When we got them, they all needed dagging and shearing, so I went and bought a pair of dagging shears.  Fortunately for us, Nibbles was hand-raised and if you go into her paddock with a bucket, she thinks you have treats (pig nuts) for her and will come over to see you and can be quite easily caught.  Unfortunately, while we were shown how to flip a sheep over, we obviously missed bits of the technique and struggled to do it ourselves.  I got half a leg dagged before she started to kick and then we couldn’t catch her again.  A timely visit from friends with plenty of experience meant we were able to get Nibbles at least dagged.  It was a very rough job, but it was done.  He also told us about the guys who will go out to lifestyle blocks like ours with a fully mobile set up and shear a small number of sheep, although it might work out to be quite expensive for our tiny flock.

Dagging Nibbles with some help from a friend.

I started to ask around various friends with small flocks and I was told to check out the Hotline - our local small newsletter that is mostly local service advertising.  I found an ad for a mobile setup shearer.  He was really apologetic about having to charge their minimum rate for fully shearing only two sheep and dagging another, but given that he came in the evening in his own time, when his wife was only weeks away from having their first baby and was here for an hour, I thought that $50 wasn’t bad at all.

We tried to drive them into the sheep yards in the corner of the front paddock.  The run, as you can see in the photo is in a state of disrepair.  This was caused in part by poorly thought out construction, and partly by a steer who got in and couldn’t get out so he kicked the end gate to pieces before we were able to rescue him from it.  The yards themselves are okay, but the gate is not a practical design.  The bottom board rests on the ground, so if the grass has grown up in front of it, it’s nearly impossible to open.  The wooden frame work is getting a bit old and not really up to the whole weight of the gate either.

Trying to drive a hand-raised sheep and two lambs is not an easy thing either.  Being hand-raised means that she isn’t particularly worried about us, she’ll duck through a gap that other sheep wouldn’t try.  Even with five of us, we couldn’t do it and gave up after a couple of hours of frustration and swearing.  The shearer wasn’t too worried, the paddock narrows down to little more than a lane at the other end and he thought he could catch them there.  He was right.

I could no longer tell which of the lambs was which, so I asked him to only dag Lamb Chop the wether as I was planning to use his skin with the fleece.  He was quite tickled by the idea, he’s more used to seeing lifestyle farmers who aren’t quite so resourceful with all the leftover bits of their animals.  He caught one of the lambs first.  Miss Eight was sure he had Lamb Chop and told him so, he stopped and checked and quite frankly said to her “No, there’s no penis, this is the girl one.”  Miss Eight set off into a fit of giggles but accepted his wisdom.

We were rather impressed by his mobile gear.  He had a battery charged clipper unit that he simply tucked into an apron/wide tool belt.  It clips slower than a full power unit, so he takes his time but  did a lovely job.

Two feed sacks full of wool (a bit daggy in places but will be sorted later and we were astounded at how much smaller Nibbles and Sheepy-sheepy (long story) looked in comparison to Lamb Chop.  The shearer also commented that they were the healthiest small flock he’d seen on a lifestyle block.  No sign of fly-strike, feet all good and he’d be really shocked if they did just turn their toes up as we’d been told sheep do.  Hubby passed that on to his boss (who we’d bought the sheep from) who put it down to giving them treats of pig nuts.