A Treatise on Sheep:: The Best Means for their Improvement, General Management, and the Treatment of their Diseases.Blacklock, Ambrose
Science
A Treatise on Sheep:: The Best Means for their Improvement, General Management, and the Treatment of their Diseases.
Blacklock, Ambrose
Sheep
A cool dry apartment should be selected in which to store the wool,
always remembering that _heat_ and _damp_ are equally injurious to it,
and that the greater the perfection in which it retains its _natural
oily moisture_, the more valuable will it prove both to the grower and
the manufacturer.
(101.) _Weaning_, where milking is not practised, ought to be set about
in the end of July or beginning of August. In some places the ewe lambs
are never speaned, but allowed to go at large with their mothers; and
though by this plan the dam is apt to be kept in poor condition, yet is
this counterbalanced by the comparative freedom of the hogs from braxy.
As an improvement, however, the gimmer lambs may be withheld for a
fortnight from their mothers, and at the end of that time may be
permitted to pasture with them. In the few places where the farmer
continues to manufacture ewe-milk cheese and butter, speaning is
carried into effect somewhat earlier, and is of course attended, in the
long run, with no little detriment to the stock and its proprietor. The
sooner that the practice be laid aside the better; for though ewe-milk
cheese is pretty universally relished and admired, yet those who are
acquainted with the scenes which happen at the bughts, know well that
the cheese itself cannot but contain much, the mere mention of which
would pall at once the appetite even of the least fastidious. In
addition to this, a great waste of grass is occasioned by the sheep
going to and from the bught, while the inconveniences they are on every
hand exposed to, at a season when they are peculiarly liable to disease
and accident, ought of themselves to lead to the abolition of the
practice.
When the udders of the ewes appear, after their separation from the
lambs, to be much distended, they may be once or twice milked, to
prevent bad consequences; but it is much better to obviate the
necessity for this, by reducing their allowance of food for a few days.
When the animal seems to suffer much irritation about the udder, it
will always be safe to give a brisk dose of any of the common saline
purgatives.
The store lambs are at this period sent to good pasture, or, where the
farm cannot afford it, are _summered_ at a distance; that is to say,
the farmer pays so much a head for permission to feed his flock, during
a couple of months, on another person's ground, at the end of which
period they are turned upon the pasture which has just been vacated by
the gimmers, they having been sent to join the older ewes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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