The Dark Side of Farming

If you’re crop farming you don’t have this problem.  If you’re raising animals, you do.

So what problem am I talking about?  Aging animals.  Sick animals.  And more specifically, what you do when one of your animals isn’t doing well.

Here’s a case study:

This is a Shetland sheep ewe named Papaya. She was 6 years old in this picture. She is now 12 years old.

She wasn’t born on our farm, so is one of our original ewes.  When I sold the rest of the flock due to health reasons (mine, not theirs), I kept her because of health reasons (hers, not mine).  She almost died  after lambing one year, and for a long time was partly-blind.  Her symptoms were a lot like an out-of-control diabetes problem.  I knew that another pregnancy would likely kill her, and even though people SAY they won’t breed a sheep you sell them… they don’t always mean it.

And if the sheep goes to a farm with a ram, even if they really did mean not to breed the sheep you sold them, the ram often has other ideas.  They are quite adept at busting gates or fences to get to unbred ewes.  So I kept Papaya and a couple of other older ladies so I knew they wouldn’t have to suffer with a pregnancy and likely die.  We became an old-age home for decrepit ewes.

Then there was the time we found her cast last summer and the next thing to dead, but once again, after The Farmer set her to rights, she rallied and eventually seemed to be her old self again.  (If you’ve never heard of a cast sheep, it means they are rolled over on their back and can’t get up.  They can quickly suffocate due to the weight of their internal organs pressing against their lungs.)

Suffice it to say, this little ewe has had her share of problems.

Now even though these sheep get to be like pets for some of us, there are some economic and practical factors to their upkeep.  Vets around here will not make a farm call for sheep.  You have to take them to the office.  If you are home alone, that’s next to an impossibility.  How can I lift a ewe into the back of a pick-up truck?

The next problem is most vets really aren’t “into” sheep, and some just flat out don’t know much about them, so more than once I have discovered that I actually knew more about what to do than the vet did.

And then there’s that pesky economic factor.  Do you take a sheep to the vet knowing full well it is going to cost more than the sheep is worth?  If the animal is young, and might produce more lambs, sometimes it’s a viable economic option.  Most of the time you are just losing money.

Worse, quite often by the time a sheep shows visible signs of distress, they are really, really sick.  In times past, whenever I have taken a sheep to the vet and dropped a couple hundred dollars, in a day or two the sheep died anyway.  Part of that is because the more common problems I know how to treat, so when I take a sheep to the vet it’s something I’m not familiar with and likely a pretty serious problem.

So now you know this ewe’s history, and some of the practical factors with a sick sheep.  And yes, she seems to be sickly.  I went out this morning to give them some hay so they wouldn’t have to go out in the rain to graze if they didn’t want to, and she was standing apart, with her eyes closed and not wanting to move.  She is obviously not ‘right’… but this time I don’t think I can make her right.

She is 12 years old. The life expectancy of sheep is similar to large breeds of dogs, about 10 to 12 years.   She has had major health problems in the past.  The vet is highly unlikely to be able to help her.

I called The Farmer at work to get his opinion on what to do about her.  Should I try somehow to get her to the vet?  In my heart, I already knew the answer but I wanted to hear someone else say what I already knew.  I guess I wanted someone else to share the burden, knowing you’d done what you could to keep her healthy over the years, but the time has come that there is nothing more left to do.  She may rally on her own, but otherwise, I have run out of ways to help her.

This is the part of farming I don’t like.  I loved lambing season, for instance, when it went well.  But I grieved every time I lost a lamb.  It was sad.  It was depressing.  It was, “What did I do wrong?” time.

But it’s a hard fact of farming that sometimes you are going to lose an animal.  And even when you know you have done all you could, it’s not easy.

That’s the dark side of farming.