Choosing
Healthy Sheep
by Pegg Thomas
If you’ve followed the articles titled Preparing
for Sheep, What
Sheep are Best for Me?, and Choosing
a Breed from my Article
Library, you have your land ready and have made
your decisions on what breed(s) of sheep to buy. Next is
approaching breeders and looking at stock. But what do you
look for?
It cannot be stressed enough that you want to purchase only *healthy*
sheep. Some of the things you’ll look for are just
common sense.
1) Is the farm you are visiting
reasonably clean and well kept? Healthy sheep come from
healthy farms. If you’re looking at sheep during
the rainy season you should expect to find mud. But if the
sheep have nowhere to get dry and have only wet manure to walk and lay
in… you may want to move on to the next farm.
Grassy pastures are always a good sign. Dry barn bedding is a
good sign. (Wet bedding can cause feet and upper
respiratory problems, a dry manure pack is not a problem.)
2) Sheep should appear alert and be
active.
Droopy, lethargic sheep are not healthy. Look at the whole
flock
and not at just one individual to help assess the overall health of the
sheep. Any flock can have one or two sheep that have issues
post-lambing
or are getting on in age. Don’t be afraid to ask
the shepherd specific
questions. If he/she doesn’t want to answer them or
seems evasive,
there are always other shepherds to buy from.
3) Look for signs such as runny eyes,
snotty noses, dirty behinds, limping, skinny sheep, overgrown hooves or
obnoxious odors. These are all bad signs.
4) Remember that sheep are not tidy
animals. Expect to see dingy, even dirty looking
fleeces. The lanolin in sheep wool attracts and holds onto
dust and dirt. Sheep get up and down by kneeling so knees are
always dirty and grass stained. Ewes with lambs tend look
bedraggled because lambs love to walk on and lay on their
mothers. A lactating ewe will often appear thin, since much
of her food energy is going into producing milk. While she
shouldn’t be a rack
of bones, she won’t be ready to win a beauty contest
either. These
things are normal.
Do some reading on sheep
diseases to help you recognize potential problems.
You may have to pay a little more for healthy sheep (poor
shepherds may sell off sickly stock cheap) but vet bills can
mount up very fast. If you have doubts while visiting a farm,
remember that you are not obligated to purchase anything!
Feel free to walk away after thanking the shepherd for his/her time.
If you are choosing a particular breed of sheep, you want to be very
familiar with that breed before you pick out your breeding
stock. Spend time researching the breed. The breed
information pages sponsored by Oklahoma
State University are an excellent
resource. Also look for the breed
association web pages for your chosen breed. For
example, know whether the breed is horned or polled, what the average
size should be, what basic wool type it should have, what colors are
registered, etc. Be an informed buyer!
On biosecurity, after visiting a farm to avoid bringing home a
potential health problem, it is a very good idea to
disinfect your boots/shoes and wash your clothes before walking over
your own property or handling your own livestock. Bleach
works wonders. An ounce of prevention really is worth a pound
of cure… and costs less too!
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the author's written permission.
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