[Shropshirelass]

Ok so I’ve got my lovely new pedigree flock of Badger-face Torddu sheep & they’ve nearly finished their isolation period which is up on Sunday. The ewes can stay together & we’re going to try & keep it as much of a closed flock as possible, once I’ve got some more ewes. Obviously we don’t want any out of season lambs where possible, & he’s been with the girls for a couple of weeks for isolation purposes, but how long do you think we could get away with it? I noticed tonight the girls were all over him like a rash, but he wasn’t trying to mate with them.

But he’s going to have to after Sunday go in with either the other tups or in with some wether lambs when we wean them at the end of the month, apparently he’s been fine with his previous owners polled breeds of tups but any tips for introducing himself to the other boys?

I’m just worried that he’s a lot smaller than our Texel & Suffolk boys, but their all polled & he’s got a pretty impressive set of horns on him & I don’t want him to take another’s eye out, especially after we’ve just invested in new bloodlines, as our other tups we’re getting old. (He has been with his previous owners Texels & other polled breeds with no problems.)

[Fleecewife]

We keep all our males (Hebrideans) together.  There's never a problem when a mature tup meets tup lambs/hoggs but there can be when mature tups go in together.  I would suggest not giving the mature tups room to take a run up. We put ours together in a pen, so close they can't even shuffle.  We leave them for several hours so they all smell the same, then we let them out and immediately offer food.  There are usually a few fights over the next couple of days but I feel they just have to work out their new pecking order, so we leave them to it. Do though keep a close eye on them; we discovered last year that a previously quiet and mellow tup can turn into a killer when there are changes to the flock (we got rid of that one).
For lambs newly removed from their dams, we just let them into the field and let them get on with it. The youngsters can run faster than the older boys.

[Shropshirelass]

Yeah I was reading it’s best to pen them in really closely so they can’t get a run up at each other, it’s more his horns I’m soo cautious of, but he must be aware of them as he’s been around polled sheep - his girls are! We’ve got a really close set up of sorting pens for both sheep & cattle including races for both. I’m just hoping they don’t get fat while also trying to bucket train them as their on nice lowland ground which is probably a bit better than the hill ground that they came off.

[twizzel]

I’ve no experience of horned and polled together, but when I reintroduce any mature rams I pen them up tight- 6ft x 6ft or sometimes smaller, for as long as it takes for them to sort out a pecking order and get bored of each other. Sometimes this is a few days, sometimes a week. Then when they do go outside make sure they’re really hungry so all they’re interested in is eating. I put a couple of ram lambs with my mature rams this week and they settled very quickly, I kept them in for an hour and turfed them out soon after.

[Shropshirelass]

Well I was worried about the size difference as he's not much bigger than some of our commercial lambs, that & getting an eye poked out. He does seem pretty quiet though.

[Fleecewife]

I don't think a two horned tup is particularly likely to poke  out the eye of a polled tup. I have seen damage done by a 4 horned tup to a 2 horned version.  Mostly they sort themselves out and are not prone to fighting to the death.  Also size isn't everything: when we sold a 2 horn Heb to a breeder who already had a Soay tup, it was the Soay that was totally aggressive.  He reversed about 3/4 of the field's length and then charged.  There was a bit of a crash but both survived.  Don't overthink it.

[SallyintNorth]

1.  Do not mix horned and polled.  Full stop, period.  Just don't do it.  (Somebody will tell you how to do it I expect but I was told this, then our Swale jumped a wall to get with the BFLs, and one of our best BFLs lay dead within minutes.  So now I pass on the advice and the cautionary tale to go with it.)

2.  Pen the tups tightly together so they've very little room to move, can't get a run up so can't really damage each other.  *Let them get used to each others smell for half an hour to an hour, then give them a little bit more space (and keep watch to be sure nothing is kicking off.)  Repeat from * until confident they can go out together.

[SallyintNorth]

And on

Obviously we don’t want any out of season lambs where possible, & he’s been with the girls for a couple of weeks for isolation purposes, but how long do you think we could get away with it?

Too late.

Nigel (aka Ever Ready Golden Balls), our pedigree Shetland tup, fathered two lots of August lambs and an October lamb.  On an Icelandic / Dutch Texel / Shetland mix, a pedigree Wensleydale and a pure but not pedigree Manx Loagtan respectively.

Don't book anything for end Oct / beginning of November.  :skipping_lambs:

[Shropshirelass]

Thanks for the advice, he’s now in with the wether lambs, the horned & polled things got to work to a point as the ewes are polled. But I’m guessing that’s with females. But when putting fly spray on them the other day I noticed 1 of our Texel tups turn on a couple of mule ewes. I’m guessing it was the heat & stress of being penned.

If they are in lamb, it’s only 4 ewes & depending on how they turn out they’ll either be for the freezer or unregistered breeding stock. A few out of season lambs might help spread out filling the freezer.