It’s ‘bring your lamb to school day’

 

Mrs Jerry is a fantastic primary school teacher and she’s always looking for ways to enhance the learning experience of her pupils.  They adore the way that she has guinea pigs, fish and a turtle in the classroom and they vie for the privilege of feeding, holding and playing with the pets.  I have to admit that the experience is slightly less rewarding for the one who normally does the ‘mucking out’ of said class pets, but sometimes I get to work with the boys who don’t have many positive male role models in their lives and seeing their enjoyment of the even the most mundane tasks, (just so long as someone is doing the work with them), makes me very happy.

Last week, it was designated ‘bring your lamb to school day’ by my wife and we made an early morning trip to see a neighbour who had moved twelve young lambs back from their farm and into their yard in order to give them a better start in life by keeping them out of the cold and away from the foxes. They were being hand fed and were as tame as they could be, following around the nearest human and bleating sweetly.

How on earth do you pick one?

I loaded one of the dogs old sleep crates into the back of the car and let the kids choose the cutest two.  That clearly wasn’t easy, but we made off with ‘Samantha’ and ‘Trip’.  Yes, they all had names, although I accused the owner of having made the names up on the spot just to appease the kids! Probably because thats just what I would have done…

Trip on the left, Samantha on the right.  How cute are they? 

Samantha and Trip, who were by then around four weeks old, bleated prettily all the way to school and then proceeded to turn my hitherto clean and new smelling car into something decidedly more agricultural.

We attracted a great deal of excited kids (and adults) as we carried the lambs into the classroom and corralled off a small area for them to roam around in. Very quickly it became apparent that we’d need some form of ‘blotting paper’ to keep the area relatively clean and I was despatched to the supermarket to buy newspapers and a bag of straw.

Getting to know you

It’s difficult not to become attached to something like a four week old lamb and they really are quite lovely. In a previous post I described how country people aren’t generally so sentimental with their animals, particularly when they will eventually end up on the plate, but that doesn’t stop them from treating their animals very well and the small flock of twelve lambs that our friends have at home certainly don’t lack for cuddles.

“Trip” in all his glory

Around twenty eight years ago as newly weds, we stayed on a friends farm in western Australia. I worked in a bauxite mine and Mrs Jerry laboured as a roustabout in the shearing sheds. The shearers tried all sorts of ruses to fluster and reduce the pretty little blonde to tears in the competitive and very male atmosphere, but they didn’t manage it.

That pretty little blonde, with Dolly her favourite sheep dog

The shearing sheds.  Note the sprung back supports, you need them after a couple of hundred sheep have passed through.

They weren’t altogether gentle with the shears either and every now and again, a sheep would end up with quite a nasty cut on their newly shorn skin. There was always a sewing kit in the shed that was used for patching up the ‘nicked’ sheep and as an encouragement to avoid cutting the sheep, the shearer who injured the sheep was supposed to patch them up themselves, but they tried it on with her and flung a bleeding sheep at her with the instructions to ‘sew ‘er up’ but Mrs Jerry had caught on to what they were doing and cooly retorted ‘you cut the poor bugger so you can sew her up yourself’ and returned to throwing and sorting the fleeces. Begrudgingly and following the jeers and laughter of all of his mates, the shearer did just that. Mrs Jerry was invited to the pub that night by them all – a rare honour indeed when Ozzie country pubs were still very much a bastion of chauvinism.

At the end of my shift, surrounded by an orange halo of bauxite dust,  I was usually dragooned into helping out with rounding the sheep up in the evenings and putting them into a holding pen for the next mornings shearing.

The holding pens.  It wasn’t unusual to see the dogs running over the sheep backs to keep them moving forward!

I loved walking behind the farm dogs who nipped and yapped at heels of the sheep in the soft early evening light and I learned that there’s nothing quite as daft as a frightened sheep when they are boxed into a corner.

Rounding up the mob.

Rather than take the obvious and easy way, which is usually to go the way the dog wants them to go, the sheep will often run in a totally different direction and get stuck in a fence or a bush. You’d have to wade in behind them, lift them up using their wool as a carrying handle and dump them into the back of the ute before they collapsed from the stress. A few years later, whilst running a wildlife sanctuary in north Queensland, I discovered that whilst trying to herd Emu’s, that they have the same daft, but in their case, belligerent temperament and rather than turn around (they can’t walk backwards) and go the way you wanted them to, they’d try and jump over you, usually knocking you to the ground in the process!

The kids in Mrs Jerry’s class absolutely loved the lambs, but for obvious reasons, I can’t publish many pictures with them in it, but here’s a nice picture of Samantha checking out their art work.

And just in case you think that I am going too soft, here’s what we had for dinner that night…

Bon appétit!

Jerry.