Heel Low ^~~^ ^~~^ ^~~^ Doggone It

[JACB Dorper]

Heel low:

Wow! That is great, thanks for the explanation and the pictures. I think I should buy a halter to start with so I can use it as a pattern. I like to make things, back in the day, I learned macramé and made all sorts of useless stuff with knotted twine. I'm sure I can get a book and learn how to braid halters and lead ropes.

I love the sheep wagon! And you trained your sheep to not only pull it, but to pull it in a parade and not run off scared of all the commotion.

Yup--it was FUN to do up and thanks!

Yes, please...do get a sheep halter lead of yer own and examine it for reference. For me, it would be SO difficult to show in photos how to make one up...having one in hand, that's the best plan, eh! That's what I did...I can do better and you certainly will!

Excellent! If''n you did macramé in the past, you're gonna find making a halter lead sweet! I never did the plant hangers and belts and stuff...just the practical (if'n dog sledding, draft sheep and halter/leads ARE practical??) stuff I had a use for and items I could not find to purchase & had to create from scratch...

The only issue, the plastic twine might not be your cord of choice for halter leads (parachute cord has its uses but I expect that too would be too thin and likely expensive, more so that fishing suppliers twine or cords) ...simply because it will slip and as I have said, the really plasticy halter/leads slip off the sheep; far too unpredictable and I hate pretty but impractical past smelling like a rose (weakness for dapping a bitta perfume when we're town bound)! I AM still a girl just not a really girly girl one. LMBO

The sheep wagon is a hoot! Rick would not have me out in public with one of those hardware store kid wagons with the topper. When I told him my plans to train the rams over the winter for draft and I saw a cute covered wagon in the latest Home Hardware flyer (nfi), he said NO WAY! Nope, he said he was not going to be publically embarrassed with our rams pulling a whimmpy wagon...that he'd build me a good one, and I have to agree, he surely did. It was his spring time project. We get pretty antsy over the nine or ten months we feel like we have winter in and first sign of springiness, there's always a builder project that gets going. Rodeo parade is in May...so he was on it pretty stellar and had her done up and we even had time to dig out some the antiques to strap to the sides of it.

Some funnies I find...I've mentioned prior that I believe people think sheep are stupid things...training them to be draft animals was right up their alley. The rams loved it. I am first and foremost a dog lady...so sledding with my Heelers was a winter past time for us...Over & By, becomes Gee & Haw and whilst my pooches are a tad house (barn) sour, I also used my braiding skills to do up sledding gear. My beasts are happy to oblige my insaneness here at THE funny farm. It also helps that they got a small nip of grains after the fact. Be good boys and you'll have a nibble of delicious. Alot of my dependents ARE foodies...food motivation fur sure.

And very much so, I won't do parades no mores...having gone biosecure means taking the sheep out can risk their health and well being and if I brought home hoof rot, I'd be very disappointed in myself. We have no OPP, Johnnes, CL, foot rot, keds, lice, etc. and plan to keep it that way. But as you say, the rams in the parade could have had a very bad time and been scared. I did lots of things people do with other ruminants like equines. I opened up umbrellas (no biggies) and flapped jackets in their faces ("She's removing clothing, hide thine eyes!! EEP!!!"), played a talk and music radio in their barn (that is a great way to condition all show animals...poultry included), tied plastic shopping grocery bags on their corral panels (the flapping and noises desensitize them to crowd commotions), clapped my hands and waved my arms at them ("Our owner, she's completely nuts, eh? That or she's about to go down from a seizure...")


Seems like yesterday but back in 2004 when we actually chatted it up on Lists...this is what I posted on Sheep-L (not sure that forum even exists any more?). I do miss those group lists...where the sum of the knowledge of all parties seemed to seep into your grey matter--everyone benefitted and grew & drew in wisdom. You could not help but get more experienced chatting it up with other like minded persons.

Sigh...these mugmag pages we see now...seems just about the time the questions asked are about to be answered, they go off line. Sorta a place where everything is rosy and if not, they leave when it might get somewhat entertaining AND educational! Sigh... definately old and missing the GOOD old dazes...eh.

I miss the chat lists...and did the same type thing more than a decade ago with a sheep club the provincial government here started. The sheep specialist that initiated the club (wooden and used to beat one about the head with, eh), said that sheep clubs were notorious for starting, doing a full cycle so all could learn how to keep sheep, and then folding up. It was true of this one too. I was president and head bottle washer (meeting organizer and paperwork doer) for two years. We met once a month, renting a room at the local library. I did not have any sheep (I know, I know...membership kept threatening to swing by and put up plywood cutouts of sheeps in my overgrowing pastures, but I wanted to take my time and find MY breed which were Jacobs) so I had time. I had time to do all the finances, rent the room, set up the chairs and tables (take them down afterwards and put them away), get the guest speakers, do popcorn, beverages, the constitution, by-laws, etc., etc... I even spent the evening prior calling all the membership to remind them, SHEEP MEET tomorrahs!

But it all ended pretty instantly when I was close to getting my starter flock in 2003 and I asked for volunteers to take over my cap...none stepped up and the club folded. I learned alot, enjoyed myself immensely but likely never again. I got learned up pretty decently and while sharing that knowledge would still be good...my family at the time (son & spouse) felt ignored and time sharing Mom when you have family is not always joyous for all involved. Later on, my spouse and I did an exhibition poultry club for a year together, but by then the number one son was an adult and the husband & wife team were spending time volunteering our knowledge & skill sets (his for building and mine for genetics and general poultry keeping) for the goodness of the future existence of heritage breeds...so it was all good for us because we passed on our poultry passion to two dozen others! The first HIT is free, what you do with the addiction is yer own biz...bwa ha ha...


So my next post will be my rangy, racy and raunchy post...

RAM-blings… Bling Bling All Gone?? ...

Doggone & Chicken UP!

Tara Lee Higgins
Higgins Rat Ranch Conservation Farm, Alberta, Canada

 

[JACB Dorper]

RAM-blings… Bling Bling All Gone??
By Tara Lee Higgins
March 18, 2004​

Posted one cheeky spring evening on Sheep-L…read, enjoy, but most of all, LAUGH!! All in good hearted fun…

Heel low:

The way I figure it, I’ve been spending far too much time on the end of a pitchfork. Be it the wafing smell of sheep piddle, puddle or pellets or the fact that I am trying hard to convince myself I am saving money on aerobics classes to keep my post winter midriff in check, it don’t much help. When I am doing MANual (now there’s a concept a woman aughta hold dear!) labour, my mind starts wandering off (I’d say it’s some kinda chemical reaction to urea, but more likely just a feminine lapse in attention span toward that “MANual” labour concept I just mentioned). Anyway, there I am, milling over the meaning of everything including life itself. ;-)

**WARNING; this following point by point paragraph IS an amusing attempt to touch on very conversation taboo subject know to mankind…well sorta…as far as any rightful sheep list is going to allow anyhoo. This is NOT meant to be serious at all, so please laugh with or at me **

- The Canadian gov’t has seen to it that they know about any and all guns (violence) we own up here in the Great White North which makes euthanizing a large ram = thick skull with a broken leg kinda interesting if one chose to surrender rather than register.
- Gov’t’s threatened to legalize pot (drugs) whether some of us use it or not (and if the neighbours do and the wind is about right, you’re using where you want to or not—can’t wait to fail a random employment drug test) but begs one to wonder how well sheep would survive on a sole diet of hemp should this homegrown crop ever take off, eh?
- La la- a radio in the barn keeps the sheep calmer to sudden noises (rock ‘n roll) and is something I am trying to do to get them ready for the upcoming parade we’ve entered. I’ve also tied plastic grocery bags around the winter corrals, so the bag’s movement & noise of flapping in the wind desensitizes the rams.
- The gov’t also announced recently that they have thrown around 100’s of millions of our tax dollars (politics) and yet have kept the borders closed to sheep because of BSE (cow disease). Well that’s just gotta make sense! Throw open the coffers for what say a decade or so, but nay say an ovine should be allowed the luxury of cross border pronking.
- We up here have legalized gay marriages (sex-blush!) of which I am quite OK with (whatever two consenting adults want to do within the privacy of their own bedrooms is their own business as I figure it absolutely has nothing to do with jeopardizing the sanctity of my own marriage)…but honesty, I figure it’s the Canuck gov’t’s way to ensure the Canadian population dwindles instead of grows (humans do not replicate man/man woman/woman as long as cloning does not count-Dolly can vouch for that one), therefore there will be less of us to complain about where our previous high population’s tax dollars went.
- And oh yah, thank sheepdoG (religion & swearing-soap please) if I don’t suddenly come up with an idea on how crop circles mighten happen (UFO’s?). I’ve been out training rams in harness to pull the covered wagon in a parade in May. So we have been making good use of their pasture while it is still snow and ice covered and not yet become spring (a.k.a. mud). The pair of tires I hitched up to them yesterday made the most perfect circular formations in the snow cover. Makes one wonder what fun you could have if it was mid fall and it was a wheat field instead of a pasture…whee do whee do…

Now of course, after all this thinking and pitching. I did decide to move on to something more constructive than contemplating all the taboo conversation topic that could contain relevant sheep references. ;-)

I did bell my Jacob rams and I thank those who publicly and privately reassured me it would NOT drive them nuts, tho about now some might be wondering about my own sanity…NOT! I’ve been putting the bells on the rams every second day in between getting them use to wearing their harnesses. Each evening I take whatever I’ve put on them that day off so they can relax and have the night off from work.

BTW, I should mention a rather nifty economical harness. I knew one could use horse halters on dogs, just turn it upside down and voila, a pretty simple harness, not going to measure up for the Iditarod or anything…but fairly comfortable and useable. Well I went into a local automotive distributor (one of the larger outlets that handle some livestock items like chicken waterers, ropes, rubber pails, parts to fix tractors, etc.) and found halters for a startling good buy. $8 (and Canuck bucks too!) for very large draft horse halters…they even had three colours to choose from, so I chose the red and the green (yeh, yeh,…Red Green…like that Ontario show…but hey, all our buildings are red siding, green roof with white trim). Gotta keep the colour theme running. My rams are currently 100 pounds, but I figure the halter should keep on fitting them up to 150+ or so.

I have braided nylon twine (3 mm size) coming in via Canada Post (that’s pony express to those in the know) from the Maritimes. Learned another thing, if you wanna buy string and not pay $0.30 or more per foot, try a marine outfitter, commercial fishing supplier…I’m getting my cord for less than one cent a foot! Hurrah!

I also managed to get a deal from the local saddle store and picked up all my brass buckle hardware for a fab price of $2 a buckle. I need about 25 for two complete harnesses with all the adjustments. I was looking at $7 a buckle at a leather product retailer.

So in the meantime that I am waiting on the cord so I can braid up the ram harnesses…I have hitched up Nicto and Noble in their upside right draft horse halters and with a double set of bale twine (yeh right off the bale I use to feed them—nothing in this world screams cheap, sorry—thrifty! Like finding a use for all that useful twine we usually throw out—grrrr!) looped into a large brass clip and again, voila! I hooked the sheep each up to an old worn out tire.

I do this with my dogs when I want to train them to sled. The sound of the tire dragging and it being behind them is really quite good at getting them use to pulling in harness…even if the tire hits them, it is rubber and it should not hurt them. Anyway, I put a tie line, a double-ended snap line, between both rams so they were sorta hooked together like when they will be hitched to their covered wagon. I have them both haltered with rope halter and lead them around slowly, keeping them calm and pleasantly amused. Of course when we did up the fake crop circles, into the barn we headed for an extra special munch of grain. I really do think the boys quite like this whole silly escapade. Can’t imagine them bored with it.

The white canvas cover we had tailor made came in and the wagon is just about completely finished off. The hitch needs to be bent and shortened to fit the boys, but all of it is pretty much completed. We rang up the bills it cost to do this and kinda wish we hadn’t, it’s been roughly about a $3,500 project…yeh and that allows nothing in there for either of our labour nor the time I am going to invest in braiding up the harnesses which I cannot even start on yet till the cord arrives here!

Guess at this cost, we might want to make sure that this happens to be an annual event. But as I said at the beginning, the mind was wandering during my barn clean out and I wondered what kind of sane person volunteer to be in front of two VERY well horned Jacob rams, leading them down a busy, noisy street in a parade no less. Not yet sure how this is all going to turn out, but again the parade is in May and my favourite pity flowers are smelly roses…so before, if and when, I recover from the horn over and subsequent wagon rolls over lumpy large woman, I will be appreciating all the sympathy cards from y’all. ;-)

Uh, and just one more word of warning, no pictures of sheep on the cards please…I am thinking about the time I wake up in the hospital bed after the coma, I don’t want to be making any sudden regressions or scaring the ward with my screams of “Killer sheeps, run for your lives!” Dingle, dingle, dingle,…Baaaa…Baaaa…wagging their tails behind them (and ah no, I don’t dock).

Doggone nasty bump to the head…anywhere else on me and it woulda been fatal,

Tara grinning from warped ear to ear…:-(