Last week featured my least favorite day of the year: the day that I have to sell sheep.
I’ve been a shepherd for over a decade, and I’ve learned a lot, but one thing that hasn’t gotten any easier is deciding who stays and who goes. I wish they could all stay, even the ones who are kind of jerks. But the limits of pasture and barn size mean choices must be made, and every year those choices make me miserable.
For the first five years or so, the difficulty was mostly sentimentality. I often knew who I SHOULD sell (the old, the infirm, the fence crawlers), but those sheep were the memorable ones. They say familiarity breeds contempt, but not with me and my sheep apparently. The more intimately I knew a particular animal, the more I wanted to keep them in the flock.
This aspect of shepherding has gotten easier with time. Not because I’ve gotten better at letting go of the misfits and decrepit, but because I’ve given up trying. My shepherding habit is not a full tax write-off for the rest of the ranch, but it’s close. My husband often says the flock’s profitability is in the stories I tell about them, and in that regard, they are profitable indeed!
Bottom line, I don’t have enough sheep, and the profit margins in the sheep industry are too low for me to make much money, no matter what I do, so now I make decisions with my heart, not my head.
This year, things felt harder again as my management strategies have evolved, or devolved, depending on how you look at it. In recent years, the general rule was that if you had a name, you stayed. Since I started having my fleeces milled into yarn, however, fleece quality and fleece color have become much more important.
So now, if you have a name, are kind of wreck and/or are a pretty color, you are probably my favorite sheep. But that doesn’t mean I’m not sad on market day, because the majority of the lambs, especially the wethers (aka castrated male sheep) have to be sold so we don’t run out of grass in the pasture next summer.
In other, more uplifting pasture news, my English shepherd, Luna, is now living with us more or less full-time in town.
When we first left the ranch for our new house, she stayed behind to keep an eye on the flock and other ranch matters. When we moved the flock to the little barn beside the town house last fall, we decided not to bring Luna. She was used to having the open fields to roam all day and night, and it seemed cruel to try to turn her into a town dog after that much freedom.
She apparently didn’t see it that way, and about a month ago started walking the 2 miles from the ranch to our new front porch in the middle of the night. We’d find her sitting outside the front door every morning, vigilantly watching over us. How she figured out where the new house was, and why she decided to start appearing nearly two years after the move, I’ll never know.
So, now she does sheep chores with me most mornings and evenings, and we walk the perimeter of our leased town pasture every night. She sleeps inside — much to her chagrin — but still goes to the ranch most days too. Last week, as we moved the flock back and forth across the yard for sorting, she was right there, holding up the rear, making sure everyone was moving in the right direction.
All of this is to say, even though I still doubt my flock management decisions sometimes and lament the hard choices embedded in shepherding, things have found a comfortable rhythm.
When I look out across the pasture at my varied and beloved flock grazing there, my good dog standing patiently beside me, I feel a peace that tells me I’m doing something right, and reminds me that even the hard parts of shepherding are well worth it!
