Lamb Tails

Did you know that lambs are born with long tails?

Sheep don't have long tails. It's not healthy for them to have long tails. I don't know why sheep are born with their tails long. That's just the way they are born.

Are you wondering how adult sheep got their short tails?

I'll show you!

This is Apple.
She's one of the lambs you saw in an earlier post.

 Lambs can't wag their tails like a dog can. It just hangs there.

That means..... yuck! When they poo it gets stuck on their tail.

Dogs clean themselves off, but lambs and sheep don't. All that yuck gets stuck under their tail and the flies love to lay eggs in it. That can make a lamb or sheep sick.

There are a few different ways to make a lamb's tail shorter. We like this way the best.

We give the lamb an injection to make sure that they won't get a
disease called Tetanus.

I'm holding the lamb in the photo. My 14 year old neighbor is giving the injection. I think that's great that she's learning so much about animals!

You may have had a tetanus shot if you got stitches.

If you get cut or step on a nail when you are outside, you may need a tetanus shot. Tetanus takes between a few days and a few weeks to show up after a wound.

It causes problems in your muscles which means that you may not be able to move your mouth, or your neck. You may have painful spasms in muscles, and you may get a fever.

Animals who get tetanus often die. Of course we don't want that to happen to any of our animals, either!

Next we clean the lambs tail off first to make sure it is free of germs.

I make sure that I can find the right spot to put the rubber band
around their tail.

We want to make sure the lamb's tail is the right length, not too long and not too short.

I have special pliers that help me get a
very tight rubber band in just the right spot.

I pull the pliers off and
the rubber band stays in place.

After about 3 weeks the lamb's tail falls off. It doesn't hurt them to have a rubber band around their tail. They run around and play as if nothing happened! 

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I have a story about a little child that was about 6 years old who visited our farm many years ago. Our lambs had rubber bands on their tails, but their tails hadn't come off yet. It's really hard to see the rubber band under their furry tail.

The little child was not well behaved. She chased the animals and wasn't kind to them. Her mother was no help! Nothing I could do would stop that girl from chasing our sweet, gentle lambs!

I was just about ready to put the lambs away and tell the little girl to get out of the barnyard.

She quickly caught a lamb by the tail! Oh, my!

The lamb's tail popped off in her hand!

She thought that she pulled the lamb's tail right off the lamb! 

She didn't know the lamb's tail was being docked (shortened) so she had no idea that she didn't really hurt the lamb.

It all turned out well because the little lamb wasn't hurt. The girl was so surprised by what she did that she stopped chasing all the animals! 

Please don't chase animals. If they are running away from you, and you are running after them that's called "chasing." Farm animals don't know how to play tag like you and your friends do. 

Chasing only scares them and makes them afraid of you and other people.

Chasing animals isn't nice. You can do nice things!

Graphing Eggs

We had a little visitor to the farm this week. She loved seeing the new chicks.

Isn't she cute?
She was so gentle with the chicks.
They came over and ate while she was watching.

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Every year we spend a few weeks counting how many eggs we get every day. We figure out how many eggs we get from the chickens, and how much money we spend on food. It gives us a good idea of how much our eggs cost. I make a graph to see which color eggs we get the most of, too.

Ewwwww!!!
Sometimes I forget that I put an egg in my pocket!
Time to wash my jacket.

Here is my egg count for this week.

• Friday, April 12 I collected no blue-ish eggs, 3 green eggs, 4 brown eggs, and 3 duck eggs
• Saturday, April 13 I found a stash of eggs in the hay barn! I collected 6 blue-ish eggs, 10 green eggs, 17 brown eggs, and 9 duck eggs
• Sunday, April 14 I collected no 3 blue-ish eggs, 5 green eggs, 12 brown eggs, and 1 duck egg
• Monday, April 15 I collected 3 blue-ish eggs, 3 green eggs, 14 brown eggs, and 1 duck egg
• Tuesday, April 16 I collected 1 blue-ish egg, 4 green eggs, 7 brown eggs, and 2 duck eggs
• Wednesday, April 17 I collected 2 blue-ish eggs, 4 green eggs, 5 brown eggs, and 2 duck eggs.
• Thursday, April 18 I collected 4 blue-ish eggs, 3 green eggs, 8 brown eggs, and 1 duck egg.

I collected 134 eggs this week. That's a lot of eggs! Chickens and ducks don't lay that many eggs during the winter. They ate about 3/4 of a bag of food this week. 

Chicken food costs $17 for a bag. That means it cost us $12.75 to feed them.

134 eggs divided by 12 (a dozen) = about 11 dozen eggs. (The actual number is 11.16, but that's really close to 11 dozen eggs)

$12.75 divided by 11 dozen eggs = $1.15 a dozen to feed the chickens in the spring.

Other things that we spend money on to raise the chickens includes electricity to keep their water from freezing in the winter, shelter, clean bedding for their pen, and gas to drive the truck that picks up the food.

We also spend a lot of money raising new chicks each year. Chickens don't lay eggs until they are about 7 months old. I have to feed them a lot of food before they lay eggs.

It's important for us to do some math to figure out how much the chickens cost us, and how much we should charge for eggs.

We spend less money on food in the summer because the chickens eat a lot of bugs in the summer and don't eat as much food. We spend more money on food in the winter because there aren't any bugs or grass to eat.

This is what my graph looks like this week.

Did you make a graph? What is different about your graph? What is the same?

Here's an interesting egg! One of our chickens laid an egg with no shell.

If you soak an egg in vinegar you can take the shell off the egg so it looks the same as Quin's egg.

See how squishy it is?

Your teacher has a whole bunch of eggs for you to look at! Have you seen a turkey egg before? Or a duck egg in real life?

Be careful! The eggs don't have anything inside them so they are very easy to break!

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Are you wondering how Echo is doing?

She's doing great!

Her eye is all healed up, and she didn't get an infection!

The veterinarian thought her injury would take 2 weeks for her to heal up. We took very good care of her and she healed up in 1 week.

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Here's a fun project that I worked on this week!
There are treats inside each bunny bag.
I made 22 bunny bags this week. 

Next week I'll show you how we dock a lamb's tail. Did you know lambs are born with long tails?

Spring Break

I hope you had a wonderful Spring Break.

We had one that was full of animals and some heartache.

We took care of some bummer lambs for the week. Our neighbors wanted some lambs to raise. They left on a cruise and my other friend ended up with bummer lambs!

Licorice likes Scout, and Scout likes Licorice.

Licorice came with her brother, but her brother was so sick and cold that he died that night. I was so sad! Licorice was sick when we got her, too. She got a shot and some other care. It was a lot of work! She was fine 3 days later.

My friend had another lamb, so we took in Apple. That's a funny name for a lamb!

Licorice and Apple liked to follow me around the house in the evening.
I put diapers on them because lambs are NOT house trained!

 The lambs are so young that they need bottles. They will get bottle-fed for about 6 weeks.

Our neighbors came home from their cruise and were so excited to meet their new pet lambs!

 Licorice and Apple are in a great home with a family that takes good care of them. They will live inside in a dog crate for a few weeks. When they are big enough they will live in the pasture with the other sheep and a goat.

The chicks are growing, and their feathers are coming in.
They are starting to look more like their parents with black feathers around their necks.

I moved the chicks to a bigger cage.
The adult chickens love to come visit the little chicks.
The chicks will look like the adult chicken on the outside of the cage.

Our peas are coming up, too!
I'm so happy we'll have peas this spring!

I planted peas on March 16th, the day before St. Patrick's Day. That's about a month ago.

Two chicks hatched over spring break, too. It was so fun to find a chick pecking it's way out of the egg!

Unfortunately, the mama turkey didn't take good care of the chicks this year. She usually does a great job with chicks. One lived so I gave it to the neighbor girl who is raising it. She named it Penny. I didn't have enough room for another chick!


The last hard thing that happened was that Echo managed to get a piece of fencing hooked through her eyelid on Monday.

The vet was in Idaho.

Oh, no!

The vet was in Idaho so I had to take it out myself. I was very uncomfortable about getting the hook out! I didn't want to damage her eye!

I gave her something called 'calf calm.' It helps cows and calves calm down if they are nervous about something. She didn't mind me squirting some in her mouth.

Look!
I can do hard things!
I got the hook out of her eyelid!
She didn't mind, I don't think it hurt when I pulled it out.

She also got a shot of Penicillin to help prevent infection. Barnyards aren't clean. It would be easy for her eye to get infected.

Every morning and night I spread salve (special healing cream) on her eyelid. She's such a good cow that she doesn't mind. Sometimes she acts like she likes having the cream on her eyelid.

Her eye was still pretty swollen on Tuesday.

I want Echo's eye to get better so I put the salve on
twice a day, every day. I know that if I do what I'm supposed to
Echo's eye will get better.

It's working!
The swelling is going down.
Echo's eye looked much better on Thursday!

Sometimes I have to do hard things on the farm. Sometimes I really don't want to do them, like taking the hook out of Echo's eye.

Are you wondering about River's new kids?

That was another hard day during Spring Break. They were born early one morning. I wasn't there. Usually River is a great mother and takes good care of her kids.

She didn't this year. She didn't take care of them at all. This year we don't get to have fun watching goat kids run and play.

We all have hard things to do, things that we don't want to do. Every time I do something that's hard, that I don't want to do, something I may be afraid of doing, or scared of failing at.... every time I do something like that I get stronger!

My sister sent me this card to remind me that I can do hard things.

We can all do hard things! And the great thing is that when we do hard things we learn and grow!

Sometimes it's hard to do something nice for someone else. You may be uncomfortable, or scared, or worried that they won't like you. 

Do something nice anyway! Tell your mom or dad all about what you did and how you felt when you did it.