Sheep

Hair sheep breeds and worm pressure:

on warm, wet grass the stomach worm decides more about a breed than looks or size do. The Blackbelly and the Pelibuey, both descended from West African sheep brought to the Caribbean, are small, tough and prolific, and their ewes often raise twins. The Katahdin, built partly from that same island stock, is bigger and keeps much of its hardiness. The Dorper, from South Africa, is the heaviest-muscled of them and grows the fastest lambs, but it was bred for dry country and copes worst with worms. So many flocks run hardy hair ewes and put a Dorper ram over them: the mothers handle the climate and the lambs carry more meat. Against goats, the difference is in the mouth: sheep graze grass close to the ground, goats browse shrubs at head height.

Breeding rams and the restaurant lamb trade:

every sheep flock in Costa Rica is a meat flock, and the restaurants and hotels that take most of the lamb want a well-fleshed carcass at a predictable size. Nearly all flocks breed with their own ram rather than by insemination, so the ram shapes the lambs more than any single ewe does, and one ram is plenty for a flock of fifty-odd ewes. A lamb scale earns its keep here: weighing lambs every few weeks shows which ones are growing and which have stalled, and a lamb that stops gaining is often the first one carrying worms.

Electric netting and night pens against dogs:

sheep walk under barbed wire strung for cows, and two loose dogs can kill several in a night, so the fence comes before the flock. Woven wire works on a fixed boundary. Electric netting on its own posts, run off a mains, battery or solar energiser, moves with the flock from one strip of grass to the next, which also keeps sheep off ground they have just fouled. Bring the flock into a roofed pen at night. Most keepers here also set aside a lambing pen where a ewe and her newborn spend their first days, and a small catch pen leading into a narrow race turns worming, foot trimming and eye checks into a one-person job. Feed and mineral blocks sit under animal feed.

What a ewe’s eyelids and teeth tell you:

pull down the lower eyelid first. It should be a deep pink-red; pale pink or white means anaemia from the barber’s pole worm, the check behind the FAMACHA colour card. Feel the backbone just behind the ribs: sharp, bare bones mean a thin animal. A ewe with worn or missing front teeth is near the end of her breeding life. Look between the claws of each foot for the rotten smell of foot rot, which spreads on muddy ground. Ask what the flock has been wormed with and how often, because wormer resistance has been found on commercial sheep farms in this country, and keep any newcomer apart from your own sheep for a few weeks. On used netting, look for broken conducting strands and snapped posts, and test the energiser on a fence tester before paying.

Ewes and rams moving to a new flock:

give the breed or cross, the ram’s breed for any ewe that may be in lamb, the age or the teeth, how many times each ewe has lambed and whether she raised twins, and the date of the last worming. A recent weight helps if you have a scale. Photograph each animal standing square from the side, with one close-up of the inner eyelid and one of the feet. For netting, state the length and the number of rolls, and whether the energiser runs on mains, battery or solar. Someone driving over from Pérez Zeledón will ask what fence your sheep know: animals raised behind woven wire have never felt an electric strand, and they need a few days in a pen with one before they will respect netting in an open paddock.