Shepherding

I got loaned out to the sheep farmer next door as help was needed there and I wasn’t doing anything particularly exciting. Our job for the day was to separate the lambs from their mums and then to weight the lambs to see which were big enough to go to the freezing-works (sounds a lot better than the slaughter- house.) My job was to basically get them into the race and keep the line moving while the other guy drafted them into different pens (I think his job was easier than mine as lambs aren’t very keen on going where you want them to go since they don’t have their mum any more.) But after we had that all finished we had to put them back out to pasture to fatten up a bit more before the stock truck came to pick up the ready lambs. So that’s where I got to play as shepherd to a flock of sheep. All that was missing was my crooked staff.

More interesting to me while working there was seeing his herding dogs at work. After seeing them in action I can’t imagine another way of rouding up a bunch of sheep. To me it seemed as if he had invisible hands rounding up the sheep as his dogs are lightning quick. He has 5 dogs that mill around the back of his 4-wheeler just waiting for their turn to go to work. Each dog has their set of whistles (12 individual whistles per dog, each with a different timbre and pattern) Once the dog hears his whistle he blasts off and starts rounding them up. All the while Dave is whistling a complicated pattern of whistles (left, right, far right, far left, steady, come, run, bark, etc…) and they love their work it looks like. The dogs look like some mix of collie and greyhound and they sure make his life easier. So I had a lot of fun just listening to him whistle and the dogs instantly do what he wants, far better than making a dog roll over.

The temperature today is a balmy 22 degrees (celcius) so even thinking about christmas is a foreign thing right now. Life at the moment is quite uncomplicated as I don’t even know whats going on in the news apart from Max telling me tidbits of whats going on that he catches in the morning. My typical day has been for the last two weeks to get up around 6 and read for an hour, eat breakfast, work from 8 to half past noon then back up to shower and watch a movie then read a book until about 8 then dinner and then sleep at about 10, rinse a repeat. No worries.