26 Marking lambs

The average age of the lambs was six weeks and it was as late as I could leave it to do the business. They have to go through an initiation ceremony that can be painful. It builds their characters and gives them something to talk about in the long hours between meals. Marking involves an injection that protects against six unspellable things, involves putting a rubber ring around the tail and another around the scrotum, drenching, and finally, clipping an ear mark, personalised in shape for your property. Real farmers might include mulesing. They might also chop the tails off with a sharp knife and slit the scrotum to allow removal of the testicles by a suck, bite and spitting process. The dogs love the product and leap on it in frenzy. It supposedly parallels ground unicorn horn in its aphrodisiac power.

Doing these numerous steps yourself requires some organisation. With help it is supposedly easier and she volunteered to do the injections and hold the lambs. The first lamb took around ten minutes including the initial catching and the second catching after the tail band went on. It was fairly close to torture though in some countries it wouldn’t be defined as that. That little pink ear didn’t look half as pretty after I had torn a lump out of it so we dropped marking in favour of ear tagging. In this process which is just as unsavoury, the ear is sandwiched between two 10 cent-sized coloured buttons held together by a rod. The rod works a bit like a rivet. Attaching requires a hygienic applicator that doesn’t work in the hands of someone of poor resolve. The advantage of tagging is that it’s lovely to see all your lambs skipping around with coloured fashion-earrings.

Lamb two was a male which meant two rubber rings and reloading the ring applicator between. The rubber bands can fly off in all directions when you hurry. More importantly, the tiny balls disappear from the scrotum if you have cold hands, or no confidence, and you have to get them back. I had practised this operation when helping a neighbour and had had dummy runs on our own lambs. It’s interesting what some farmers get off on.

The balls came down nicely with a two finger abdominal prod and a gentle reassuring blow in the ear. The rubber rings went on and the balls were nicely captured in the scrotum. And off he ran baaing to mum saying it was nothing really, and don’t I look cute with my ear marker. Ten minutes after ringing the lambs were in agony as the appropriate parts discovered they had no blood supply. They hopped, ran, stopped, lay down, curled up and did yoga. But within half an hour it was back to mum for a drink.

We worked our way through them and gradually perfected the methodology. If I sat down comfortably on a box and cuddled the lamb on my knee on its back throughout the process, and did all the operations, it worked much better. She acted as nurse handing over scalpels, swabs and so on. We did the last ten lambs in the time it took to do the first one. Surprisingly, none of the males turned into rams possibly because they drank the river water.