Govinda Hare is a song about a cow herder. Not just any cow herder, but one who figures very prominently in Hindu culture. Of course I don't have cows, nor am I a Hindu. But I do have sheep, and often when working with the sheep, this song springs to mind.
Because of today's event, I thought I would share the song with you as well as some pictures of what happened today. If you want to hear the song, click on the triangle like play button on the thing above.
We have a sheep we called Gray. Gray arrived here in December. She was always a bit weird as far as sheep go. Despite being a weird sheep, henceforth the ewe known as Gray will be called Lady Gray.
Photos follow below.
2 comments:
Stormrider is your biggest fan. When is he going to Belize? You do a good job documenting your life. I'm catching up after a few months of losing the address.
StormRider is a very good friend of ours from before we left. He has been very helpful in many ways. I would not go so far to say we could not have done this without him, but it might be fair to say I would have gone a lot crazier without his supportive emails.
But I am glad you are here. We have a female sheep that gave birth to one lamb. In her breed twins are the norm. She is a first time mother.
The lamb is apparently getting plenty of milk. However the mother seems to be very uncomfortable with nursing on one side. The first day the lamb was born, the mother walked with her leg away from her udder.
We have held her and let the lamb drink as much as possible from both sides. But the lamb gets full and stops nursing to go play. We have milked the mother out as much as we can, but ... we are not good at that.
The milk is not off color, not odd in texture, and smells like milk ought to smell. Johnny even drank a bit and said it tasted like cows milk (though it has been four years since he tasted real milk). Since then I have read that milk from a sheep with mastitis could be very dangerous to drink and we will not taste it.
I have read that the symptoms of mastitis include hard spots in the udder. There is firmness in there, but I don't know if that is considered hard. Visually both sides of the udder seem the same.
The udder is warm, maybe even hot, but I don't think feverishly so. The mother's behavior is normal except she will kick off the lamb if the lamb nurses from the side that hurts.
I am also nearly certain that the side that was uncomfortable has switched since the first few days.
I may be overly paranoid, but this is only the second time we have had a sheep give birth.
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