Page 6 - Winter 21-22

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Phytolacca sheep
By Edward de Beukelaer, UK
Dolly is a Cotswold sheep of about 4 years old. She is fat and they cannot get her to lose weight. All the other sheep had lost weight when they were put in starving paddocks after a lush summer but Dolly stayed fat and a bit lethargic. She is fat over the body even though her abdomen is clearly reduced in size due to restricted feeding.
Her udder is completely flat. She was a good mum, she was careful with her lambs.
She is careful about the electric wire. She respects the wires more than the others. She will have to put herself up before walking over a wire that is lying on the ground in a passage way. She eats really fast.
She bustles around, she is always on a mission to do something, go somewhere. She will walk up to us, she is friendly. She is not the easiest to catch. If you let her go she will be difficult to catch again.
If we need the sheep to do something, she will always be there at the front in the perfect position for the herd to proceed. She is super reliable. You can ask her to do anything. She is the most reliable one in the flock if we want them to move about. While the others panic, she will get on with it: if I have to I might as well get on with it. She is already ready to get on with things by the time you turn around to get them to move. She is a strong, big, resourceful personality.
She is inquisitive and will crane her neck if you want to take a picture.
When her lambs were born it was as if she invited everybody in to come and have a look at them; she was pleased to have everybody (all people she knows) there. She called for us to come back when we went to leave her. She was actively delighted to have us all there. She likes the company.
She will stand by the fence to say hello; she is friendly and she will
come up to have her back scratched even though nobody ever feeds her over the fence.
She is one of the bosses in the herd, she is not the top one, one of the sensitive reliable ones; she stands up to herself, guards the bucket of food very well, she gets her head in and eats faster than anybody else.
She did not like the last ram and she did not get in lamb, nobody really liked him, he was pushy and she was not having it. She used to tussle with the ram, even in season she tucked in her tail and ran for it, she was not pregnant. (Did she not get mated?)
She gets on with everybody. She had an extraordinary fight with her mother, like they were glassy eyed, they would not have been distracted by anything: they were eyeballing each other and they fought. It went on for about an hour, she was 2 years old. It was intense, I think her mum won.
She weaned an adopted lamb then, she lost the first lambs she carried. One of the three lambs next door came under the barrier and latched on to her. As far as she was concerned there was a lamb and that was fine.
If she has a problem she will like the others come to us, she is very much like that.
When they are in a new field, she always comes around when I go around the field to check the electric fence. She is checking the boundaries of the space she will be grazing in; she follows me checking around, she needs to put in her brain the space she is in.
She is obliging and reliable, friendly etc and she was a friendly lamb.
She won't be in the scrum of the herd when they all come up to us. She has worked out that when she is in the big flock there will be a bustle. She will follow you to the last bucket because there will be less competition.
She was frightened by all the people at the show when she was 1 year old and then eventually came down to check everything out,