Managing the Homestead

Being a homesteader is not always easy.  In fact, often you have to make hard, but necessary decisions.  This weekend, we finally 'acted' upon a decision that was made last spring.  It took us a year to 'finally' say:  enough is enough and put our ram down.

Unless you are a shepherd, you probably don't realize that a ram is the most dangerous animal on any farm or homestead.  Yes, they really are more dangerous than a bull.  I don't know if they are more dangerous than a Jersey bull because I don't own a Jersey bull, but I have heard they are from people who have had both.

I am not even going to speak concerning other sheep breeds, because I am not familiar with any breed except the Gulf Coast Sheep.  However, I have been told by friends that have had these sheep since the 1960s, that the Gulf Coast ram are the most aggressive rams around and will take down rams from other sheep breeds in one blow.  They have seen it happen more than once. 

There seems to be a distinct character and physical trait to determine if you are going to have an aggressive Gulf Coast ram.  It's the horns.  Yep, if your ram has horns, it will be aggressive.  If your ram is polled, it normally is not aggressive.

Our first ram, Dodge, is polled.  We were advised to never get a horned ram due to the aggression.  So as newbies back in 2005, we purchased our first polled ram.  Our flock grew and we gained experience.  Then in 2009, we had the opportunity to purchase a beautiful Blue Gulf Coast ram.  The blue describes the color.  It is a sheep that starts off black and then fades to a beautiful chocolate color.  Since all we had were white sheep, some natural color for our fiber friends would be nice.  The only trouble with the ram:  he was horned.  We made the decision to go ahead and get this ram.

When he was young, he was fine and easy to handle.  But time quickly passed and as he turned one year, we learned to NEVER and I mean NEVER turn our backs on Blue.  And then we learned that we had to keep at least two ewes with him at ALL times or he would go through the fence to get to the ewes.  Then he learned, I'm sure by smelling, that we had another ram.  It seemed he would bust into the barnyard to get to Dodge every two to three months this past year.  More than once we got there and you could tell the fight had been going on for a while and that the ONLY reason Dodge was not killed was due to his mature size.  Honestly, it is not easy for a polled ram to defend itself against a young horned ram.

In fact, I can remember getting up in the middle of the night for a drink only to hear hammering going on down at the barn.  I listened and listened and listened.  I could not figure out 'who' would be at the barn at this hour hammering!  So I woke my husband and after making sure our oldest was up with the phone in his hand, we proceeded down to the barn to check out the problem.  We could not believe that Blue had broken through two strong gates and was butting the front of Dodge's stall to get in to him.  I quickly ran back to the house to get the boys and ropes.

For the past two years, the big pasture has been off limits to the young children and to me.  We just could not walk out there safely.  And we are not set up to run two completely different flocks of sheep, but since Blue had the big pasture, we had to run another flock up in our orchard.  This is not healthy for the trees as it is full of young trees!  And this past week, Blue decided he was going to be sneaky to get to Dodge.  He went threw our main fence that separates us and our neighbor's property and came at Dodge from that angle.  We fixed the fence, but the patch did not hold him.  So then we put him in our calf pen which put him closer to Dodge, but had two strong fences between the two rams.  When he had almost made it threw one of the fences, we finally decided that we had no choice but to put him down.  

I'm sure some of you reading this will say:  Why didn't you sell him?  In today's world of lawsuits 'just'  because you 'looked at me wrong', how can you sell a dangerous ram to someone who 'thinks' they can manage him?  And how could we sleep at night knowing that the ram had killed or maimed someone just because we did not have the courage to kill him?  It was not an easy decision.  In fact, it took us a year of being chased, butted, and knocked down for us to make this decision.  And then it took us another 9 months to act on this decision.

He has three years worth of babies on the ground.  And in fact, the latest one arrived today.  We are blessed because we still have his color genetics in our flock and a good friend of ours has a BEAUTIFUL blue ram from him...that is polled.  And we now have a freezer full of meat.  We don't know yet if we will like it.  I will let you know.  If not, that is fine.  We will grind it up and use the meat as dog food.  His fleece is currently salted and being tanned.  His horns will be turned into Shofars

Blue, a mature Gulf Coast Ram