Sunday, April 29, 2018

We Bought a Farm: Did I seriously just castrate a ram?


We returned home from our trip to D.C. 
Within one hour we were out in the fields ...
castrating our 12 male lambs. 
I "kid" you not. 
(Kids are goats, I know, but it sort of works here.)
Have I ever done this before?
Certainly not.
Was I planning on participating?
(Are you even asking this question?)
My job was to help catch the little lambs and bring them to the castraters. 
(Is castrater a word?)
But there were 12 boys to castrate, and for crying out loud Sidge had already done a few.
So I decided to add it to my list of the things I'd never dreamed I would do.
#Ican'tbelievethisismylife

P.S. We currently have 12 boys and 4 girls from 11 moms. Wow! That is a lot of boys! We still have 7 more moms who haven't given birth. We decided to do castration this year as a different approach so that the little boys could stay with their moms longer. (You have to move them out at four months otherwise as they are old enough to mate their mothers at this point.) We also thought this would allow us not keep our two big daddy rams, Captain and Admiral, for another season, and not run a third paddock. We are going to try it for a year and see how it works out. There are different schools of thought, and we thought we'd try this one this year.


P.S.S. I will have many more pictures from our week in D.C. But I wanted to quickly share a picture of me with my girl, Arabelle, and her seven puppies. Much more to come on both of these topics in an upcoming post.



3 comments:

Joia said...

I thought your animals were only supposed to have one bad minute in their lives? ;)

Wendi Kitsteiner said...

Joia, apparently this does not hurt them :)

In addition, if we think doing something will make it better in the long run, we will do it. This will allow them to stay with their Mamas :)

Anonymous said...

It doesn't hurt them at all because they are not anywhere near sexual maturity. At this age it's like cutting an umbilical cord (blood supply but now a whole lot of feeling) that's why you castrate them young because once older and the hormones make them grow well that would just be inhumane