Setting
Up Your Soay Sheep Breeding Pens
Prevent Unauthorized Breeding!
There
is no great mystery to this - you just have to keep non-breeding rams far enough
away from the ewes that regardless of how enticing the ewes may seem - that it's
just a bit too much trouble to get to them.
All
of our non-breeding rams are housed together in one of the larger fenced forest
areas. There are two shelters in there for them and we are able to feed and water
without actually entering the pasture. This is important because during the rut
- breeding season usually runs from end of September through end of December here
in the NW - you don't want to go into the breeding pens with the rams unless there
are two of you - or unless you have eyes in the back of your head. NEVER think
that because the rams have always been fine before, that they've never challenged
you, that they know who's boss - that they won't get a twitch and think your knee
caps make a fine target. One of the best pieces of advice I received was "ram
is also a verb."
We
had over twenty ewes and seven rams to divide up into breeding groups fall of 2007.
As we are still clearing and fencing this was only possible if there were common
fences between the groups. When you have a common fence between your breeding pens/pastures
you must cover the fence entirely - top to bottom - so that the sheep on either
side of it cannot see the sheep on the other side. This keeps the rams from bashing
each other through the fence, AND it keeps ewes and rams alike from breeding through
the fence. You just have to keep them from seeing one another, be creative - you
know your farm and weather patterns so you can come up with a solution that works
for you.
We
regularly get very strong winds through here in the winter months so whatever
method we came up with not only had to meet the criteria to prevent bashing and
"unauthorized" breeding - it also had to stand up to 50+ mile an hour
winds. We recycled long solid strips of blue tarp. Go ahead and groan... I did.
The prospect of seeing so much blue tarp strung all about made me nuts, but I
liked it better than the other option of spending money on camo tarps when the
sheep didn't care either way. We tied the tarps to the top of the fencing with
baling twine through the grommets, and down the ends through holes we punched
ourselves. We then took plastic fencing - the kind you see at construction sites
that they mark the "no traffic" areas around trees they are preserving
- and tied that over the tarps. Then we took t-posts and drove them in a foot
or so to sandwich the plastic fencing and tarp between the t-posts and the fence
- so that when the wind hit that it wouldn't just fly up. This is ugly as sin,
but it worked great and didn't cost us a penny. We had no bashing, no rams jumping
fences, and from all appearances - since the rams now seem very bored with the
ewes - breeding season was successful.
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