A Treatise on Sheep:

epartment in the business of a farm. So much depends on the nature of the locality where sheep are kept, and on its situation in

refore, to a great extent, be trusted to the intelligence of the farmer. All, therefore, that I shall aim at in treating of this division, will be the giving an outline of the more important matters connected w

e weeks, as it does not do to have lambs dropped after the middle of May; indeed much trouble will be saved to the shepherd if he can contrive to have all the lambs yeaned about the same time, as the flock will, from its numbers being of a similar standing, be healthier, and every way easier to manage, than one in which there is a great diversity of ages. Such ewes, therefore, as have not evinced an inclination for the male, ought, before the above period has elapsed, to be driven

er sent to them till a fortnight after they have been put to the older ewes. Much nicety is always required in choosing the t

king care to make the good points of the one remedy the defects of the other; but where a farm is destitute of such accomm

be carted to their pasture. When they roll awald, and cannot regain their feet, prompt assistance should be afforded them, else they will soon die. Death in this case occurs from suffocation, though the m

nancy may, by proper management, be induced at any period. Of these the Dorsetshire and Wicklow varieties are the most noted, and are on this account sel

night, until they have produced twenty or thirty lambs. These lambs are then put into a lamb-house, which is kept constantly well littered with clean wheat straw; and chalk, both in lump and in powder, is provided for them to lick, in order to prevent looseness, and thereby preserve the lambs in health. As a

lambs, and those ewes whose lambs are sold, are brought in and held by the head till the lambs by turns suck them clean: they are then turned into the pasture; and at twelve o'clock, the mothers of the lambs are driven from the pasture into the lamb-house for an hour,

y from one guinea to four, and the rest of the year at about two guineas each. This is severe work for the ewes, and some of them die from exhaustion. However, care is taken that they have plenty of food; for when green food (viz. turnips, cole, rye, tares, clover, &c.

ime, should be seventy feet long and eighteen feet broad, with three coops of different s

cing with cow's milk, a quarter of a pint is given, twice a-day, to each lamb, and this is gradually increased to a pint, exclusive of the milk from the ewe. This method of fee

cessary quantity of milk, the shepherd ought always to be provided with a bottle of milk, which he should drop from his own mouth into that of any lambs which may require it. Such mothers as appear to suffer in bringing forth, should be relieved with the utmost gentleness; and when a miscarriage occurs, if the weather be at the same time unfavourable, the dam ought to receive the shelter of a roof. When the ewe is lost in yeaning, her lamb, if it survive her, must be reared by another dam. Some little artifice is always necessary to induce a ewe t

e sheep's back; but in Spain that operation is always deferred till the fleeces have been collected, when they are subjected to a thorough scouring, in public buildings appropriated to the purpose, and termed lavatories. This is a plan in many respects superior to ours. Its adoption by our farmers has been recommended by Dr Parry. There cannot be a doubt of its being the preferable mode as regards the saving it would effect in the lives of sheep; but as it is well known that shearing is much facilitated by washing, and that on the neatness with which the clipping is accomplished the quality of the succeeding crop in a great measure

, by a man standing mid-thigh deep near the water-edge, and turned back downwards, the head alone being above the surface. Plate V. fig. 1.[20] It is then turned from side to side, and moved backwards and forwards, so as to make the wool catch upon the stream and wave about. When the first washer has held it for a few minutes, and partially cleansed the fleece, he passes it up the river to the next, who goes through the same routine, and, on being convinced that the

in this country of depriving sheep of their wool. In the first, or coarser method, which is only adopted in the case of Cheviot and heath sheep, the operator sits upon the ground, and placing the animal on its back between his knees, shears the wool first from the belly and legs, and then, after tying the latter, proceeds to clear the back. In the second method, the legs are never tied, as the disposition of the sheep is such as to render it unnecessary. The

and damp are equally injurious to it, and that the greater the perfection in which it retains i

nd 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

nt 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

y, 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 o

sheep are covered with long wool; while rolling, as the other is usually called, is only required for such as, in dry situations, are surrounded by a short close pile. In pursuing the former plan, the smearer takes up

t is laid evenly upon the skin. This is by far the neater way of salving, as less of the ointment is permi

t be properly done unless the day fixed upon has been preceded by dry we

be well diluted with grease, so as to enable two English quarts of it to be spread over six sheep. In this way it will be less liable to adhere to the wool, and will be much more readily laid upon the skin. When sheep are salved without due attention to the even spreading of the mixture, the insects with which the skin is infested are, instead of being destroyed, allowed here and there a resting place; and as the severity of their attack is in proportion to the l

uiring to be the greatest length of time in the hands of the farmer, and the Leicesters as the reverse; wethers of the former variety being usually disposed off when from three to fo

stricting them for great lengths of time to one kind of provender, a thing guarded against by all good breeders. Sudden transitions, however, from a poor to a nutritive pasture, and the reverse, are always bad, and therefore to be avoided; but change of feeding ground, with these restrictions, cann

g already been detailed in the article on Crossing, I shall o

more durable, and will last three years if kept under cover during summer. Two men are required to set them up, besides a horse and cart to take them to the field, on which account nets have a decided preference, being easy of transportation, and requiring little house-room. Th

ep not then intended to be fattened. A fresh supply should always be afforded them before the old one is eaten clean, otherwise their fattening will be much retarded. It is usual to allow them at the same time plenty of salt, placed up and down the field in troughs or boxes,[21] and

e preferred for feeding sheep, as from the formation of the upper part of the bulb, water cann

ed. Occasionally a sheep will be unable to gnaw a turnip, owing to a peculiar formation of the head, the lower jaw being so very short as to give the profile some resemblance to that of a pig. S

erbs. It is no unusual thing for turnip-fed sheep and cattle to become quite lean, as the farmers say, "almost at the lifting," for no other reason than that they have been confined too strictly to one article of diet. They have been denied access to plants containing of all things the one most necessary for the maintenance of their health-bitter extractive matter-as it is called by c

n restricted to them frequently falls very far short of the expectations of the owner. In the greater number of instances, also, farmers are unable to account

at frequent change of pasture is the soul of sheep husbandry, though they see no reason why sheep should not be kept for many successive weeks on a patch of turnips. They admit the necessity of a frequent shifting in the one case, but deny it in the other. Magendie, a celebrated French physiologist, has shown, by experiment, that it is impossible to keep an animal in a healthy state longer than six weeks on one article of diet, death frequently taking place even before the end of that period; but our sheep-farmers, in happy ignorance of the fact, confine their flocks for months to turnips only. And what, may I ask them, is the consequence of the practice? Why, that it is not unusual to meet with sheep-owners who lose at least one out of every fifteen, and all owing, as may easily be proved, to this mode of management. In the first place, the turnip is a kind of food entirely foreign to the nature of the sheep, and one to which, at first, they evince great repugnance. There are many varieties of sheep incapable of feeding on turnips, owing to the form of the face, the upper-jaw projecting considerably past the lower, hindering the chisel-shaped teeth from being brought to bear upon the root. None of our British breeds certainly have this as a regular feature, nevertheless they are liable to it; and there are few farmers that have not, several times in their lives, met with grun-mouthed sheep, as they are called in Scotland, from their profile resembling that of the pig, and suiting them for poking in earth, rather than for eating in the usual way. Again, if the structure of the sheep's mouth proves that it is not adapted for eating turnips, the composition of the turnip no less satisfactorily shows that it is not calculated as food for sheep. Bitterness is essentially necessary in the food of all herbivorous animals; without it, indeed, they sooner or later fall into ill health. This property is shown by chemists to reside in the extractive matter of plants, which has, therefore, been called bitter extractive. The quantity is also found to be in the inverse ratio of the nutritive powers of the plant; that is to say, where the plant abounds in alimentary matter, the proportion of bitter extractive is small, compared with what it is where the former is deficient. Turnips contain a large quantity of matter capable of affording nourishment to the body, but they yield little or none of the bitter principle. In consequence of this, sheep acquire fat rapidly for a time, when placed on turnips; but, experiencing a want of the medicinal bitter, begin with equal rapidity to lose the advantages they so recently gained. Their appetite becomes depraved, and, from being shut out from access to the stomac