The morning before yesterday, I was just wrapping up a comment to this otherwise excellent post over at the Inadvertant Gardener in which I was ranting about the blindness of progressives and the need for them to realize that “socially conscious capitalism” is an impossibility when I happened to look up from the monitor and out the window. “Hmmmm,” I thought, “those sheep look awfully far away, and really close to the tree line.” I looked a little closer. “Crap. The sheep are out.” Absent-mindedly, I submitted my comment with my last thought truncated and closed the laptop. (Apparently there was either a second step I needed to take in order to submit my comment or the blog owner didn’t like what I had to say and chose not to let my comment through because it never showed up) Then I threw on my boots and trotted out of the house down to the barn to get Jen and a bucket of alfalfa pellets, which I have been feeding to the sheep as win-them-over treats.
As soon as we walked into the pasture, it was clear that one entire section of the electronet had been pulled down, which could only have been done by one of the two horses that were sharing the pasture with the sheep because when the spikes of the rods of all of the sections of the neeting are inserted into the ground it takes an immense amount of force to pull them out horizontally. Even one by one and perpendicular to the ground there is a good bit of resistance. The sheep, once freed, had made their way down to the bottom of the pasture to the edge of the woods, and were grazing the brambles and other weeds that were growing through the fenceline. They were about 400 feet from their paddock, which had been set up in the middle of the pasture, with the nearest edge about 300 feet from the nearest electrified fence wire, with a strand of polywire run from the main fence to the sheep paddock, with a bunch of fiberglass rods to support it.
The electronet was all twisted up, the last rod was bent in half, and a few wires around the hole where the horse’s hoof had been were broken. Jen and I untwisted the netting and set it back up, leaving two sections open, so that we could hopefully lead/drive the sheep back into it.
Jen stayed up at the paddock to close it up once the sheep were back in it and I walked down toward the sheep. When I got within about fifty feet of them, I jiggled the bucket, which I do whenever I feed them the pellets. Almost immediately, the sheep raised their heads and started jogging toward me. I turned and started walking up toward the paddock, jiggling the bucket. This went well until we got about 100 feet from the paddock. I saw one or two of them eye Jen and they slowed down. The sheep are used to me, not her. A bunch of them stopped. A few continued to follow me, but eventually they stopped too, and by that time the first bunch that had stopped turned back around and moved back down the pasture.
On the second attempt, Jen made her way down the pasture below the sheep, careful not to spook them, and then as I jiggled the bucket and started to lead the sheep, she walked slowly behind them, putting just a bit of pressure on them. That worked for a bit, but then they started to wander off. We were doing a good job of keeping the stress down. Nobody was excited; they just weren’t going where we wanted them too.
At this point, Jen started suggesting moving the electronet to the sheep rather than the sheep to the electronet. Jen has never set the electronet up and has no idea how unwieldy it is, relatively speaking, so I said no, that the sheep would just walk around it as I tried to unfurl the netting around them. I said we needed to try to get them back up to the paddock, but after a few more tries, I realized it wasn’t going to work, so I gave into Jen, who had continued to argue that we should move the fence.
I quickly gathered a section of the fence and got in front of and a little below the sheep. Jen had been trying to get near the sheep to put the alfalfa pellets out in a feeder so that the sheep would stop and eat them, but they were moving away from her whenever she got too close. So she just slowed down so as not to drive them too quickly and I started to set up the fence. As sheer luck would have it, I was able to get enough fence up to make a square corner and Jen was able to get well enough below the sheep to drive them up into the corner as I continued to set the fence up around them. After another minute or two, the sheep were enclosed in the fence and grazing happily. Jen had been right. I am quite certain, however, that moving the fence to the sheep would fail as often as it succeeds. As it was, the sheep had been only about five feet above the open end of the fence and were drifting beneath it as they moved across the pasture. Regardless, this time it worked, which is all that mattered.
A half an hour later, I had moved the second section of fence down to the sheeps’ new location, dragged the shelter into it with the tractor, and given the sheep water. Just as I finished, the giant storm that I had been racing against arrived with flashes of lightening, huge booming thunder, and huge, wet, cold driving rain drops. I have always been quite certain that I will be killed by lightening, so, terrified, I put the tractor into high gear and sped out of the pasture, down the aisle, out the gate, and into the safety of the barn where I was greeted by a bunch of screaming goats who were wondering why the hell they hadn’t been fed yet.
