I’ve used little bottles of food coloring, waiting for lambs to go to mom for milk. A squirt and “blue” gets a scrapie tag and written down who mom is. LOL Got to get them tagged because mom licks the color off.
Used that trick to mark puppies. Was planning to use it this year but no food color. When we go to California for doctors' appts in June and to see new grandson, will go t Smart N final and get the large individual bottles of food coloring.
We just put all of the lambs that haven't been tagged into the entrance to the chute and open the gate from the stall where the ewes are. All of the ewes that have lambs in the chute will stay in and the rest will leave. That makes it easy to let them sort themselves out. The way we work around them all of the time they aren't skittish so it's no problem catching them.
When we were trying to figure out all the calves on those cows he brought home from pasture for the preg check... the calves had been tagged but none of the cows were... we tagged the cows as they went through the chute and then about 2 hours later, turned out one calf at a time and watched to see who they went to and SUCKED.... Took about 2 hours or more to do it one by one... we had an idea of a couple, but some were really hard... because they would go to a cow, but because they were not little babies, it took awhile before they actually went on and sucked... We also had sorted the cows into a couple groups as to where they were going to get moved to.... but got them matched... Much easier to do it with littler ones... they go to momma to get a drink as a "sense of security" thing. and the cow will mother up on a little calf quicker.