How to live in balance with your local coyote population? Here’s some of my thinking and learning thus far.
Of course the first temptation is to shoot at them, there is a very alluring promise of an immediate sense of “justice” and relief of seeing that thief dead! Removing certain animals from the population is a valid part of predator management. But, only a part. Continue reading “Living With Coyotes: Part 2”
We are sure having trouble with the coyotes this year. Last year, we experienced almost zero predation, I think we had one duck go missing all year, and no sheep losses. We rarely saw coyotes during the day, and when we did, they were off in the distance, hunting mice in the fields. At a human encounter, they quickly made themselves scarce. We heard them howling at night, so knew they were present, but we were all coexisting OK.
But, starting in January, that has drastically changed! Continue reading “Living With Coyotes: Part 1”
When we got Bronte the LGD, I was a bit worried about how things would go when she was first introduced to the Border Collies. While she was penned with the sheep in the small pen, if the Border Collies passed by outside the pen, she would snarl and threaten them. Which is good, it’s her job to deter strange dogs that look like they want to eat the sheep. But, clearly it would be ideal if the Border Collies could work without having to to lock up the LGD.
It turns out, there was nothing to worry about. When I first moved the sheep down to the pasture, a few times I had to work them, to get them into their Electronet pen. So, I just did it, to see how it would go. And Bronte was OK with it. The only annoying thing is she definitely gets in the mix. She is curious about the Border Collies, and wishes they would play. But, they ignore her, like she is a gnat flying around in their field of view, not a nearly 100 pound pup trying to pounce on them! They have zero interest in play or fraternizing with other dogs when there are sheep to work.
So, it makes for challenging herding. Bronte switches between getting in the way of the collies and getting in the middle of the sheep, and then sometimes throws in some llama-hassling for fun, too. It’s good practice for the collies, they really have to handle a lot of different pressure points when there is a dog running randomly through the sheep, the llama is sparring with the dog, and then the ewes are all stubborn and protective of their lambs and don’t want to move.
In this photo, you can see Maggie way in the back, behind the llama (who is showing her Angry Ears at this process). Maggie is trying to get this crowd bunched together and moving towards me. But Bronte is strolling through the middle, with her tail high in delight over the mayhem. The ewes are all spread out, and they turn on Maggie and stomp if she pushes too hard. But, she is able to get the job done, with some patience and an occassional, warranted grip.
I haven’t been working Gene as much, because this is very difficult for her and takes more time. Gene will feel too much pressure and kick out “into orbit,” and it’s hard for me to call her in to work the sheep consistently with all this chaos, she doesn’t like it. And, if she is off contact, the sheep spread too much, Bronte starts pulling on lamb tails and legs, and I start to yell! Hopefully a little later in the summer Gene will get some more chances to work, once Maggie has the lambs all dog broke.
Maggie is also the best tempered for the chore I am doing every three days now: moving the Electronet “square.” Maggie is “sticky” – she loves nothing more than to get sucked into the sheep, using her eye, and get them in a deadlock where nobody is moving. This is a very annoying trait when I want her to move them and she is frozen in space and time, and no amount of verbal commanding can un-stick her. But, it comes in handy when I need her to hold! I can park her anywhere holding the sheep and leave her, and she’ll keep them there.
So, when I’m ready to move the square, I park Maggie in the sheep in one corner of it. I move the other corner, then move Maggie and the sheep into it. Then I move the other half and box them all back in, and call Maggie off. I find that having Maggie hold the sheep in a tight bunch makes things less risky while Bronte has access to the sheep. She is less stimulated by that, versus having the sheep spread out in the pasture, where she can start to chase them and get to tugging on the lambs. I don’t want her to get in the habit of this, so I try to keep things very boring for her when she has a few minutes “in” with the sheep.
Our Katahdins are all in various states of shedding off their winter hair coats. This is #10 and her ram lamb. You can see her winter coat peeling off her shoulders. Once they are done shedding, they look so clean and trim!
The birds have been appreciating the wool in the field, we often see them carrying it off for nesting material.
A few days ago, when I was out in the field moving fencing, a woman stopped by. She asked if I would move the dog house to be closerto the sheep, so that Bronte would be more likely to use it (she hasn’t gone near it that I know of). The woman and I talked for a while, I told her a bit about the Maremma breed, and about Bronte and her life as a livestock guardian. In the end, she said, “ok, thank you, I feel better now.” I guess it’ll just take a lot of education to convince people that Bronte’s life isn’t so horrible after all!
I’ll start by ending any suspense: the Jacob ewe lamb died last week. This in just a week after I first noticed there was a problem, and she was five weeks old. On a Saturday, I ear-tagged and weighed all the lambs.
All looked fine and healthy; albeit the Jacob lamb was still thin. She was not exhibiting as much weight gain as I’d like to see, or as the Katahdin lambs are demonstrating. She was 5lbs at birth, and was up to 9lbs 3 oz 30 days later. This, compared to #33’s triplet ewes, who all gained about the same amount of weight in just over two weeks.
And, if I compare her to the single ram lamb born in January: he gained fourteen lbs in a month, nearly tripling his birth weight! But, this was not unexpected, since her dam is severely underweight as well.
So, back to the problem: she looked fine that Saturday morning when I handled her. The following Monday night, she had large bald patches all over her hindquarters! Her wool was completely disadhered and peeling off! She was shivering-cold from the rain. I put a synthetic fleece jacket back on her (she wore this the first week of her life as well) and went inside to read. What could cause this?
None of my sheep books mentioned alopecia (hair loss) at all, except in the context of skin parasites. This was such a drastic change, surely it was not due to lice, keds or the like. I could see no sign of parasites, scabs or inflammation; and the rest of the flock is OK. So, I browsed the Internet looking for ideas. When you think of rapid hair loss, of course cancer chemotherapy is the first thing to come to mind, chemical toxicity is the most likely culprit. And, once I started thinking along that vein, I remember noticing her head in the mineral salt box when I was out there on Saturday. I think it is unusual for a young lamb to be interested in salt, if, ideally, she is getting everything she needs from nursing. 
I found a few citations on the Web indicating that selenium (SE) toxicity can cause alopecia; though the citations were referring to sheep turned out on grass that was high in SE concentrations. We have low SE in our region, thus it is added to all sheep mineral supplements sold here, and is certainly present in mine. She could have OD’ed on the salt lick, out of a sense of desperation for minerals she was not getting in her milk. Alternatively, her dam may have OD’ed on it when she came to our place, if she did not have access to mineral supplements at Lynn’s; thus passing dangerously high concentrations of it in her milk.
This reference cites hair loss from SE toxicity. This reference cites salivation, neurological distress, blindness, and convulsions. By Tuesday, she was foaming at the mouth, so OK, that’s symptom #2. Wednesday, she also seemed to show some “head palsy” movement, and an odd gait in the rear, so definitely some implication of neurological problems. And she was tired, she did not want to be up on her feet much.
The first Web citation suggests treating with a sulphate mixture, but this sounded too scary to me, especially since I had no way to confirm my diagnosis. The second citation says, “Treatment may be attempted, however the prognosis is guarded.”
In case you’re wondering: a vet call is usually not warranted for production animals. It sounds harsh, but these sheep are a meat crop, with their final value being only around $200. And, to some extent, doing heroics to save weak animals is not wise: it certainly does not improve your breeding program, and usually does not result in a good meat animal. I would easily spend thousands of dollars to save my dogs, who are both farm help and treasured pets. But, the sheep must make do with whatever assistance I can offer them in facing Mother Nature’s challenges, without the benefit of hospitalization.
Since she seemed OK, other than the wool loss, I started with a homeopathic remedy for poison: Arsenicum. By Thursday, I was convinced she was on the mend, she was up and about, and though still a little palsy-ish, she seemed to be nursing, keeping up with the group and staying warm in her jacket. I stopped giving the remedy, as I’m always afraid to over-do homeopathy.
But, she must have taken a turn for the worse Saturday night in the cold rain. Sunday morning, she was flat on her side, convulsing, wet and cold. I also noticed a “weirdness” in one of her eyes: it looked like the eye of a deceased animal, cloudy and motionless. Blindness? I brought her in, warmed her in the bathtub, dried and re-jacketed her, and stuck her in a dog crate with blankets and a heating pad. I gave her a few more doses of Arsenicum, then switched to Belladonna (another homeopathic remedy) for the convulsions.
She improved slightly over several hours, the convulsions died down to subtle twitching, and she seemed more relaxed. I’d heard some rattle-ey breathing that morning, so then suspected pneumonia on top of everything else. So, I started her on penicillin, gave her a shot of vitamin B, and an oral dose of vitamin boost. She seemed to rally over the next 24 hours, but then crashed again, and ultimately died, a week after I first saw the wool loss.
So, the “prognosis guarded” warning was right. Though she seemed to fight hard, if this was a mineral overdose, it was probably too much for her kidneys, especially in her malnourished state. I’d be curious to learn if others have seen this manifestation before, or if anyone has an alternate guess as to the cause, since I couldn’t find a lot of written help on this set of bizarre symptoms.
As for me, I’m definitely going to think twice about taking in any poorly conditioned animals in the future! At least since this Jacob ewe was a gift, if I invest a lot of feed in re-conditioning her, she may still be worth it next fall when she’s bred again, if she can produce vigorous twins next year. But I think it’s a classic demonstration of how critical maternal nutrition is to the success of the offspring!
I sheared the Jacob ewe this last week. I started by using my electric horse clippers, but found them to be way too slow. I’m not sure if the blades were dull, or whether they were just not the right kind for sheep shearing. But they definitely did not perform like I’ve seen in the movies when sheep shearing is featured! I finished the job with old fashioned hand shears. It was a lot of work, I’m grateful I only had small animal one to do.
The good thing is that using the hand shears allowed me to leave an inch or two of wool on her. She is so thin, I didn’t want her to be too cold. I was able to sculpt her into looking healthy: she feels much worse than she looks. I’m not good at scoring, but I’d give her a “1”- she really needs to gain a lot.
I have wormed her, so hopefully she can start gaining weight now, with the pastures really greening up. Now that I have her sheared and can see her, I think she is a nice animal conformation-wise: a nice long body and neck. She is smaller than most of my Katahdins, but not tiny. I look forward to seeing what her crossbred lambs will look like next year.
Here is a photo of her in January, pre-shearing. She had two year’s worth of wool on her. I discarded the wool, it was fully of blackberry vine thorns and crud. Though she has nice fiber, I think it needs to be cleaner to be marketable. An I need to learn to be a better shearer!
I got my scrapie DNA test results back already- wow, both rams are “RR”! That’s pretty cool news. I think what I’m going to do is keep them both for this fall’s breeding cycle, and split the ewes between them, so that I have a more diverse lineage next spring.
I’m waffling over whom to keep for the longer term. Hershey is getting older, so I may sell him so someone else can get a few year’s use out of him before he’s ready for the slaughter truck. Hershey is a very good ram, big, sturdy, nice hair coat, tough feet, and calm. The ram lamb is nice in body, but he is wooly, and short-necked. So I should probably be picky about that in using him too much. Rams have so much influence since they end up siring so many offspring, it’s important to choose very good ones. Versus ewes, one can be more forgiving with some flaws, as long as they are good mothers and are paired with a high quality sire.
I don’t entirely mind the shedding wool, most of the year they are still nice-looking animals. But right now, while they are shedding, they look very moth-eaten, and the wool they shed is messy in the pasture. So, I think I’d like to work to breed away from that for my own personal tastes. Not to mention, it’s the preferred thing to do for the Katahdin breed improvement, as the “true” hair coat is supposed to be the goal. On the other hand, that is mostly an appearance-based evaluation of the animals. My primary focus is their production traits: do the ewes produce robust twins and are the offspring well structured in their meat traits, and fast-growing?
By the way, I can’t remember if I provided this link before. Here is a very nice explanation of the scrapie DNA subject, courtesy of the Erradicate Scrapie website. Simple enough for the layman to understand, but technical enough for the interested breeer to find useful in evaluating how DNA testing might fit into their breeding program.
I am so impressed with the inexpensive nature of DNA testing for livestock: the going rate for a single sheep DNA test is just over ten dollars, and multiple companies are in competition for your business. Contrast this to the dog show world, where some researchers accept public funds to do DNA research.Then they get the help and cooperation of dog lovers and owners to collect samples for their studies. Then they turn around and patent their findings and sell the patent to a single DNA test company, who can then monopolize the test for seven years until the patent runs out.
This results in DNA tests for canine breeding stock that run about $200 “on sale” at a clinic setting! This phenomenon has made it exhorbitantly expensive for dog breeders to try to do the right thing and test their breeding stock for all known hereditary diseases. Verifying a dog is “good” for breeding can cost upwards of a thousand dollars! Contrast this to the sheep scrapie gene discovery, which is now in the public domain, multiple DNA test companies compete to offer the test, and the price is very reasonable. I don’t know if this particular tets may also be subsidized, since it’s in the public interest to reduce scrapie. But, the drastic difference in price clearly points to some level of profiteerism on the dog DNA tests! I doubt that demand is a factor- I would almost bet that more dog DNA tests are done than sheep.
I always try to encourage “dog people” to ask questions before they donate to, or participate in, reserach projects on DNA, to first verify that the researcher has pledged to publish their findings to the public domain, and not patent them. My understanding is that this is a hot ethical topic in the research community, but one that we’re little aware of as laymen.
I decided I wanted to test two of our rams for the scrapie resistance gene. Rams that are “RR” at codon 171 are valuable in that all of their offspring with either be “RR” or “QR,” both of which are considered resistant to scrapie. Hershey is our older ram, I am interested in his status. I did not castrate #900, who was born in January, thinking I may want to keep and breed him. He was sired by Jessica’s ram, #650, so is unrelated to all the sheep I have (except his mother, of course). And, #650 is “RR” and also is a very nice ram, so capturing his genetics may be desirable. So, I’m testing those two rams before deciding on my breeding plans for this fall.
The other two ram lambs born this year I castrated- they were born late enough that they’ll probably still be around when the ewes start going back into heat around August/September. I don’t want any accidental breedings, or the necessity of having to separate them; so they’ll be dedicated as butcher lambs. I figure that if I decide not to keep #900 for breeding, I’ll either sell or butcher him before that time frame, so it was safe to keep him intact. He is a lunker, a chubby boy, his mama is feeding him well!
I shopped around a bit on the web for DNA testing companies. I found three, but sadly, one appears to have gone out of business in the last week, I assume as a result of the tough economy. Of the remaining two, Biogenetic Services, offers customers the option of using blood “cards” instead of collecting blood in a vial/tube. I didn’t want to have to call a vet out, or haul the sheep to a vet just to collect a tiny bit of blood. I figured I could probably figure out how to draw blood on my own, but would still have to get a hold of the “purple top tubes” necessary to send blood in vial form. And then you have to pay for faster shipping, to keep the blood fresh.
By comparison, collecting a few drops of blood to put on a paper card is much easier to collect, and mail. Biogenetic Services sells the cards in batches of 15, for a dollar each, plus a few bucks S&H. I purchased a small box of lancets intended for diabetic use, so that I could be sure that each blood sample was clean. The instructions say you can also use the same piercing instrument and clean it with alcohol between animals, but there is risk of contamination. We are talking about such small quantities of blood here, that if you just get the tiniest bit of somebody else’s blood mixed in, it will invalidate the sample.
I spoke with the veterinarian on staff at Biogenetics, and he warned that even animals housed together in close quarters (like a feedlot) can often have each other’s blood on them. He recommended collecting from the ear, which I did. I found that piercing the tip of the ear produced the best blood drop, which I carefully squeezed from lower on the ear, to keep my hands away from the sample. I tried to make sure that I handled the card from the edges, and that the only thing that touched the target area of the card was the blood drop.
Then all that was left to do was label the cards, and send them off in the mail in a regular envelope! I’m anxious to learn the results!
Last weekend, we moved the sheep back down to the pasture to graze. The move almost went without mishap, except that at one point, the sheep drifted down to the end of the driveway by the road, and noticed the green alleyway by the tree farm. They decided to start strolling in that direction. I wasn’t able to get down there very fast with Maggie, and because that area is unfenced and close to the road, I didn’t want to send Maggie down there by herself.
As I carefully pursued them with Maggie, they drifted further and further, until they finally stopped, three properties down, where the properties border an elevated road. Fortunately, they stood there in indecision long enough for me to get around them with Maggie and nudge them back home. My heart was in my throat though, partly from running all that way, and partly because I feared that if they got onto the road, or Maggie disobeyed me and rushed to try to bring them, we could have had a disaster!
The sheep are happily back in their graze now. The first few nights, I fence the sheep in an inner circle of hotwire, and the dog in an outer circle. The dog was very fearful about the move (Kirk actually carried her the whole way down to the field, because she cannot yet walk on a leash!). I was worried I wouldn’t be able to catch the dog once she was loose in that big area, and frightened.
But, after a few days, they all settled in. So, now the sheep are inside the hotwire, and the dog has the rest of the pasture to roam. The lambs are safe from the dog, and coyotes would have to make it past the dog, and the hotwire, to get to the sheep. Now, I have to move the hotwire rectangle every week or so to put the sheep on fresh grass, and let the worn spots rest.
This morning I moved the wire, in the photo you can see the left side is muddy and eaten down, and the right side is fresh green grass. The Premier Electronet fencing is all that it promised to be- easy to move and very effective at keeping in the sheep.