[ZaktheLad]

Did anyone watch this tonight at 8pm on BBC4?  I thought they gave a very good demonstration of how NOT to lamb a ewe and also how NOT to saw off part of an overgrown horn 

[waterbuffalofarmer]

No not me sadly, would love to though but I will need to buy a TV license.

[Coximus]

I've seen it before, Thought it was an honest show of what upland life can be like from the peoples persepctive;

What was wrong with removing the horn with saw wire or the lambing method?

If you have 500 sheep to tend to, speed is the kindest and most important thing when it comes to saving a life, as with a badly stuck lamb in a field of 100 lambing ewes, sometimes the gentle smallholder approach is just not possible.

[twizzel]

Saw it the first time it was on tv and watched again last night. Thought it was very good at showing the highs and lows of farming- not sugar coating lovely lambs skipping along the fields. Made me feel better as I had just come in from watching one of our lambs give up on life thanks to getting stuck in a bramble bush the night before !

[Marches Farmer]

If you have 500 sheep to tend to, speed is the kindest and most important thing when it comes to saving a life, as with a badly stuck lamb in a field of 100 lambing ewes, sometimes the gentle smallholder approach is just not possible.

We have a holiday cottage on the farm.  The level of ignorance of the realities of producing food shown by some of the guests is truly breathtaking.     

[macgro7]

If you have 500 sheep to tend to, speed is the kindest and most important thing when it comes to saving a life, as with a badly stuck lamb in a field of 100 lambing ewes, sometimes the gentle smallholder approach is just not possible.

We have a holiday cottage on the farm.  The level of ignorance of the realities of producing food shown by some of the guests is truly breathtaking.   

Yup. "You eat your pet chickens???" Someone asked me. Seriously? I said yes. I eat my chickens, ducks, geese and bunny rabbits!
People are so stupid...
When you think about it we wouldn't have any agriculture at all if we didn't have livestock. No wheat no potatoes withoit manure. No clothes without wool or cotton. No meat without breeding and killing animals.
That's one of the reasons I have a lot of animals. So my children can learn where food comes from. So they know it's not created in asda.

[Foobar]

I saw it the first time around, and yeah wasn't impressed with the lambing (can't recall it exactly but they should have caught it and sorted it straight away (with lube) instead of farting around for hours), or the horn removal (again can't remember exactly but I do recall cringing ... cut too close to the base of the horn making it bleed? ... besides shouldn't be keeping stock that needs it horns cutting anyway, just making life hard for themselves!)

[DartmoorLiz]

I watched the episode a while ago and was impressed with the candid reflection of the reality of hill farming.

[SallyintNorth]

I am pleased that it was warts and all, not the sanitised fluffy pap they feed us on Countryfile and the like.  And I get totally sick of seeing 'the talent' trying to do stuff, instead of showing us the experts doing it properly. 

The director of Addicted to Sheep came to our local woolly event, Wool on the Wall, and I had a good chat with her.  She had had to work extremely hard to make the BBC show all the lambing footage.  Good on her, and on the Hutchisons, I say.

I did say that on our farm, we'd have had the vet out to that ewe - but then, we are well located, with vets usually no more than 20 minutes away.  The Hurchinsons' place is about an hour for the vet to get there, apparently.

I also mentioned that I carry soapy water and latex gloves with me on the quad bike at lambing time, and that stuffing a hand and some dung back up inside a ewe was never necessary or acceptable - but again, accepted that we all get tired out and overworked at lambing time, and we have all done things we'd have preferred no one else to see.

So yes, on balance, very brave of the director and the family, and I'd like to see more films like this.

[ZaktheLad]

What was wrong with the lambing method?  Nothing I suppose if you advocate an horrendously rough lambing using 2 different pairs of filthy hands followed by an even dirtier piece of baler twine and no lube to a ewe that has obviously been trying to lamb a large lamb for hours and has now lost any lubrication. 

The fact that the ewe was in a field just behind the farm house gives no excuse that the ewe was right up in the hills in the middle of nowhere and therefore nothing was within reach. 

Also cutting off horn to the point that it bleeds copious amounts of blood whatever method you use to do it is extremely painful to the animal.  Again, the excuse that this is a hill farm and life is tougher on such farms is not acceptable when the treatment of the animals leads them to suffer.  Surely some antibiotic spray would have been more appropriate to use after the mess they had made of the horn, rather than a wadge of moss. 

The best part of the programme was the lovely children - nice to see that there are still kids out there that can get by without being constantly stuck to their playstations and mobile phones and that enjoy spending time playing outside.

[Scotsdumpy]

Moss is well known to absorb and staunch bleeding. It was used in the great war for this.

[Foobar]

I think the point really is that they should not have made it bleed, without administering a painkiller.  It's not like they were in a rush, it was done at the steading if I recall correctly.

[SallyintNorth]

The lambing upset us too.  The first time I saw it I was quite shocked.  I think, with all the reaction there has been to it, it is very likely that the Hutchinsons would now call a vet sooner, and use more lube! 

I would far sooner have films like this than have them all be Disneyfied, and therefore feel that we have to say our piece, and then support the makers.  Otherwise no one will ever be brave enough to do something like this again.

I also felt that as the ewe was in the field behind the farmhouse that lube and/or soap should have been fetched.   However, I do know how cream crackered a hill farmer can be on day 15 of a hard lambing, and having just caught the ewe, how impossible a mountain it would have seemed to then let her go, return to the house, come back, catch the ewe again...

There is also the issue of editing, and some of the lambing footage was in a further away field.  I'm not sure I can remember exactly which bit was where, except I do think the dung-on-hand incident was at a distance from the farmhouse.

I'm not saying it's okay, but I am saying that it's understandable and that all of us sometimes don't quite do things as well as we would like. 

On the cutting of the horn, sometimes it is necessary to cut into living tissue.  Our vet has done it twice for us (when I farmed Swales.). Anaesthetic can be used but is of limited help.  Tourniquet ditto.  Cauterising can be used and is, in fact I saw a bullock's horn getting cauterised on The Yorkshire Vet recently. 

I totally agree that breeds where major horn trimming is frequently needed should address horn growth angle in breeding programmes - but a) inevitably, one focuses on other aspects, and an outstanding tup with one close horn is probably still going to get used, b) it's not just genetics - how the lamb lay in utero can affect later horn growth, for instance. 

In Blackies, they shape the horns in the tup lambs, to make them grow out more.

Finally, on antibiotics, it is far better to not use antibiotics were there is no infection.  Moss to staunch bleeding and act as a natural antiseptic is a much better thing to use than the ubiquitous and overused blue spray.

[SallyintNorth]

I think the point really is that they should not have made it bleed, without administering a painkiller.  It's not like they were in a rush, it was done at the steading if I recall correctly.

I don't know that we know they didn't use an anaesthetic, do we?  I've made a tup bleed when I wasn't expecting to, and his reaction has made me very careful in future - and I mean from the point of view of my own safety!

[Foobar]

I think the point really is that they should not have made it bleed, without administering a painkiller.  It's not like they were in a rush, it was done at the steading if I recall correctly.

I don't know that we know they didn't use an anaesthetic, do we?  I've made a tup bleed when I wasn't expecting to, and his reaction has made me very careful in future - and I mean from the point of view of my own safety!

Only a vet can administer an anaesthetic I thought ... and I didn't see one?  If they had surely they should have said so.