I haven't any advice to offer - and will be reading any given to you with interest - but I have had a fright, and a tragedy, with my hoggs and new lambs.
I've got my last year's hoggs - ewes and wethers - running with my lambers this year. (This is my fleece flock, so mostly Shetland, Shetland x and other primitive/natives.)
They have an extensive area to roam - several fields, plenty of hedgerows and wooded bits.
The first three to lamb took themselves well away from the flock to do so, and kept their lambs away for several days.
When the first lambed ewe - Pricket, one of the Manxes - brought her lambs (her 4th crop) back to the flock there was bedlam. All the hoggs got very giddy and silly, and one of the 3-year old Castlemilks (who was geld last year and who can be aggressive with new flock members) was aggressively rough. Pricket is impressively armed so I wasn't worried about her being able to protect her lambs.
Excitement levels were high for 10-20 minutes; hoggs were running all over the place. I didn't see exactly what happened as I'd gone off to check on a missing shearling (who had produced two beautiful lambs
in a secluded spot in woodland near the river), but when I came back to the main area, the other Castlemilk was lying prone about 100 yds away from the others. She died within a few minutes.
You can imagine I was very upset about Whirly, and worried about the other lambs, especially the two who had just been born.
However, by that evening, the teenagers were more settled, and Pricket brought her lambs with her to the feeding line without incident. I know that the hoggs had been to visit Lessa and her two, with no apparent ill effects. A couple of days later, another of the shearlings - Harry Potter, in fact Pricket's daughter - produced a pair quite close to a high traffic area (a gateway between the two main fields.) The other sheep seemed to leave her alone for the first day, and after that Pricket was nearly always nearby - I wondered whether she was helping her daughter protect her lambs.
It seems that as lambing progresses, the hoggs are increasingly used to it, and are learning how to behave around newborn lambs - and their mothers.
Will I run the hoggs with the lambers next year? It's a problem, and is making me question whether it is practical to run a flock of sheep like these alongside the commercials. I can't commandeer three fields for my wee fleece flock when we've a couple of hundred commercial ewes also needing space! And the alternative, of running my hoggs with their commercial peers, also causes worries and issues - will they stay in the field, or jump out? (there is history of not recognising boundaries...
) Can they safely eat the same type and quantity of cake as their commercial peer group would be getting? Where some of mine are horned, might they cause damage to any of the commercial sheep?
Topic: never happened before (Read 4059 times)
