It is, by definition, nigh on impossible for a control freak to let go. Of anything.
I’m not sure I would count myself as a total control freak. Do I like my house neat and tidy? Yes, when possible. Am I neurotically early for every scheduled thing that is important to me? Also yes. Do I follow special interests to a degree that is a little too deep and then become unable to let go of said information, despite the possible detriment to my mental health and sanity? Yeah, but I like to think other people do that too.
Anyway, letting go isn’t in my makeup. It’s something I have had to get comfortable with over time. Despite the overall sense of being neurotic—and maybe that’s not the right word, but it’s the one I’ve landed on— much of the time, it does come with its perks. Tenacity has gotten me places that I never would have gotten without a wildly determined personality.
But it was letting go that saved the second dying sheep on my farm in the span of just twenty four hours.
My ram, Faust, came from Virginia. It was May of 2020, the pandemic was in its highly-unknown phase. We didn’t know how the virus was spread, its actual death rate, or really anything about it. Schools were shut down. People were wiping their groceries off for fear of contamination. Farming doesn’t wait for pandemics to stop before it keeps going, and I had found the perfect ram to add genetics to our flock. The problem was that we were in Maine, and he was in Virginia.
I convinced my sister and husband to go on a 26-hour road trip (turn and burn, baby) to Virginia to pick Faust up. He was worth every mile: Gentle, sweet, wide set horns, a nice long back, which is everything you want in a ram.
It turned out, rather quickly, that Faust did have a flaw: He suffered from occasional thiamine deficiency, which causes paralysis and blindness. When the symptoms are recognized in time and treated quickly, they recover and continue on with their lives. If the symptoms aren’t caught and dealt with quickly enough, the sheep will die either from the symptoms or from rolling over onto their sides and bloating.
“Bloat” is a common term for a wide variety of farm-animal ailments, and it’s worth describing here. There are many types, and each farm species has its own special kind of bloat. Bloat generally refers to tummy troubles, which, in farm animals, are often deadly. Mature sheep bloat comes in two forms: Frothy bloat or free-gas bloat. Frothy bloat has to do with eating too many rich nutrients too fast, and free-gas bloat happens when the rumen (the first stomach of a ruminant, hence the term) cannot expel gasses— which it should be doing regularly. Think of it like a balloon blowing up indefinitely inside of your abdomen: At some point, that’s going to start impacting other parts of your body, say… your lungs. You can smother from the inside out. Or perhaps it will burst. Suffice to say: Bloat is generally a very bad thing.
Back to Faust. Faust had a thiamine deficiency which we found out the hard way, but were able to figure out eventually. He had three separate thiamine episodes in which we were successfully able to bring him back from by slamming him with subcutaneous doses of thiamine over the course of several hours, and in one instance, days. (thiamine has an incredibly unique smell, something between nutty and earthy, and sometimes I will catch a whiff of it in my kitchen where I keep the medications, and it brings me right back to every time I’ve had to save that damn sheep’s life.) If you are fully aware of the early symptoms, you can easily treat the problem. I, myself, am highly neurotic and over analytical, causing me to be highly attuned to pretty much everything about my animals: Respiration rate, how they eat, the way they walk and carry themselves. Most farmers develop this over time, simply by being around their animals and having run into plenty of problems in the past. My neurotic personality helped save Faust more than once.
Other than this deficiency, I really liked Faust. He contributed to producing handsome offspring. He liked to have his ears scratched. He, himself, was very handsome and manageable.
This past Friday, about two and a half years after I convinced my family to drive to Virginia to pick him up, the band of neighborhood kids found him stone-dead in the paddock.
Which was simultaneously shocking and not at all surprising.
It turns out, I had tucked away a thought into the back of my mind that if I was not around to see him for a period of time— say, eight hours or so— Faust could feasibly have an episode and die. So, to find out that Faust was dead was not shocking in that way. I was surprised by my own reaction to the news, asking the group of kids, “Huh. Are you sure?” To which one breathless thirteen-year old girl exclaimed, “Yes, we’re sure- we even poked him!” Great.
But no matter what I knew about Faust and his condition, I was truly emotionally attached to him. He was a great guy. Good genetics overall. And I hadn’t yet put him in with the ewes, so we won’t be having any spring lambs. Plus, it was the band of neighborhood kids who had found him and so now I owed their parents an apology for them having to go through that. (In all honesty, they didn’t seem super phased by it.)
So Faust was dead as could be on a Friday afternoon. I called my dad, who said he would come tomorrow to pick up the carcass and put it in the compost pile over at the big farm. Except for the head, which we would process into a pretty impressive skull.
It might seem morbid, but the truth of the matter is, Faust was dead and if I could have skinned him, I would have done that, too, because there is no sense in wasting anything he could provide for us. Sadly, because he had bloated, it would have been too much trouble to skin him by the time I’d found him. We would have to puncture his rumen and expel the gasses and other contents, which is absolutely not worth the trouble if you know what a rumen smells like. So, we planned to just take the skull, and compost the rest.
The next day came, bright and sunny and a little cold, and I spent the morning stacking wood in a wrist brace because I currently have a stress fracture in my right arm. Highly inconvenient for someone who does a lot of things, let me tell you.
By the time I was finished with the wood, I was exhausted physically, and still had to emotionally deal with the hoisting of Faust’s body into the back of my dad’s pickup. My oldest son, who is thirteen, knew that Faust had died, but I hadn’t had the heart to tell our littlest, who is five. We’ll call my oldest W and my youngest C. C is no stranger to death and life on the farm, but we had lost one of our horses this past summer and I didn’t think he needed any more favorite-animal death, so we had him stay inside while we worked with Faust’s body.
Now, when Faust died, my guess is that he had a thiamine episode, and then got stuck on his side where he bloated. I surmised that because of the way his body was laying, as well as the way the ground was cleared around his legs- it obviously was a struggle for him. For that, I feel awful. I never want them to die, but that is inevitable: However, I would prefer it to be an easy death for them, when that is in my control.
Which it was not.
Anyhow, when I had gone to inspect his body earlier I had noticed the familiar smell of a sheep’s rumen, bacteria building from the inside, and then finding its way out. It is, in one word, putrid. But, something I expected and didn’t think much of.
Until my husband and father came down to lift the nearly-two-hundred-pound Scottish Blackface ram into the back of the truck, and my father was truly unprepared for the smell.
My father is, at least in my eyes, someone who can do anything, and do it with humor. He is hilarious. And authentic. Salt of the earth. He doesn’t like beheading animals any more than I do, but will do it for me because I’ve asked him to save Faust’s skull. He’s that kind of guy. Above all else, Ray is hard working and hysterically funny.
Which is why I couldn’t stop laughing when he strung the rope around Faust’s horns, lifted his head, and immediately started dry heaving at the smell. He tried to pull himself together, but couldn’t stop gagging. The stench of the rumen was getting to him, but he was laughing while gagging, and I was in stitches over the sight of it.
That’s one of the things about farming— if you don’t laugh, oftentimes you’ll just cry.
I ended up providing Vick’s vaporub for inside dad’s nostrils, and he was fine after that. We got the ram loaded up, and he left for the big farm.
It’s never easy to lose animals. You know their lifespans are shorter than yours, and you accept that they are less medically understood than we are, and on top of that, they can’t communicate the way that we can. So, oftentimes you have to learn to accept what the fates deal to you. That said, you become acutely aware of the signs and symptoms of problems, and sometimes your interference is helpful, and sometimes it is not.
For example— and I’ll write more fully about this another time— deciding when to interfere with a ewe in her labors is tricky. There is no equation to tell a shepherdess when to jump in and use her skills, and when to let well enough alone. Sometimes your interference can result in a live lamb that would otherwise have died, and sometimes stepping in can cause the ewe to stress out and make more problems for everyone. It’s a fine line. And often it boils down to your understanding of a particular animal and her “normal” state.
Anyway, yesterday I was left in a state of being acutely aware of my sheep and any problems they might have. This always happens after I lose an animal. I like to think this is just a state of learning, and each lesson I go through, I become a better shepherdess.
Evening arrives. The sun is setting over the mountains to the west, causing a bright pink gradient fading to grey. It is going to be chilly, as October is wont to be. I bring grain out to the sheep, who are separated into two paddocks: Ewes on the left, rams on the right. The girls attack their grain with the ferocity of starved dogs, as per usual. I spend some time snuggling my favorite ewe, Lyra, who is a 2022 bottle baby that nearly died, as well. (Common theme with sheep…)
I look over to the ram paddock, and her brother, Loki— who was also bottlefed— is frothing at the mouth and shaking his head.
I stand up and yell to no one, “Are you fucking kidding me?” and then run up to the house for my medical kit and some vegetable oil. Remember the two types of bloat? Frothy or free-gas. I have no idea at this point if Loki is bloating, or just choking, but either way, he’s getting treated for all of it because goddammit, I am not losing another sheep today.
Running back to the pasture, I use the drench tool to shoot about 30 ccs of vegetable oil into his mouth. This will ease frothy bloat. He is sputtering and flinging his head around and I mentally hope I haven’t shot any of that into his lungs, because then we’re looking at pneumonia.
I stand there, staring at him for a few minutes, waiting for him to show a sign of what he’s feeling. While I wait, I call our large animal vet and leave a voicemail. He is standing uncomfortably, not trying to eat grain— a sure sign of a distressed sheep. He’s still drooling. Fortunately for both Loki and I, he is a bottle baby, and so is more than happy to let me touch him and move him around.
You can feel bloat happening on the back left quadrant of the sheep, kind of right behind the ribs. And sure enough, Loki feels as tight as a drum, round as a balloon. I call my husband who, blessedly, picks up.
“I need half a cup of baking soda mixed with a cup of water, right now please.”.
“Wait what’s going on?” He is confused and has zero context of why I’m demanding this.
“I literally can’t talk right now, just need the dose,” and I hang up.
I will apologize for being rude later. First, we have to save Loki.
I hear my husband and our littlest, C, walking down the hill. I run up to meet them because walking is not the right pace for this emergency: Bloat can kill an animal incredibly fast.
I shoot the mixture into the lamb’s mouth. Baking soda is alkaline, and will therefore work to neutralize the acid in the sheep’s rumen and stop creating all that gas. He is still not putting up much of a fight, which is not a great sign. I have no Gas-X to give him, I can’t find it. Add that to the mental list.
His stomach is expanding. My husband and C go back up to the house because I just don’t think C needs to see an animal die right in front of him, and I am quite sure that’s what’s going to happen.
The ultimate goal of treating bloat is to enable the sheep to expel the pent up gas in its stomach. It’s a race against time and anatomy: If there is some blockage, it won’t happen. If you wait too long, the sheep will die.
There are three possible next steps: One, puncture & aspirate the rumen from the outside with a needle. You can only do this if you’re confident in anatomy and have a long enough needle. Additionally, this is only a temporary relief, not a total solution. The rumen needs to expel the gas on its own. All this would do is buy me time. I know where the rumen is, and I have a needle, but I want to try something else first.
The second possible next step is to tube his rumen. You would do this by taking a rubber tube or a part of a hose and putting it through his mouth and into that first chamber of the stomach, the rumen. It would be impossible for me to do this on my own, and also, I don’t have the right tubing. Which I immediately add to my mental list.
The third possible step is the most rudimentary. You simply lift the head up, and start lifting the stomach as well, agitating the gas in the stomach and trying to get it to shift around so it can escape.
I drag Loki to a small hill in the paddock, put his front hooves on it to help the gas go up towards his head. With my left hand, I lift his head up, with my right arm, I bear hug him and palpate the stomach, trying to force gas out of him. It is tight, round, and I can hear the gas bubbles moving around. “Come on!” I say out loud to him, and in that moment, he belches.
Two large belches come out, and I wonder briefly if I won’t lose this sheep. I palpate and try again, and nothing comes out. I leave him be. My vet finally calls back. She tells me that I’ve done basically everything she would do, except that I need to slam him with antibiotics because of the possibility of fluid having gotten into his lungs and causing pneumonia. Which also… causes bloat. Can I give him antibiotics in the morning? No, she says, it really should happen tonight, can I drive to Turner to meet her? Sure.
At this point, it is pitch black and about 7:30pm. I get in the Wrangler and speed off to Turner to pick up antibiotics and banamine. For the record, I do have banamine on hand, I just like to keep it for the horse in case he goes down, so I’m picking up extra. You can probably never have too much of that kicking around.
It is a 45 minute drive, so I will ostensibly be gone for just shy of two hours. That’s two hours for Loki to go down and die. I get to the dairy farm in Turner where my vet lives, get the meds, and speed back home. Husband and C go out to check on Loki because I just can’t wait two hours to know if he’s dead or not. He’s still standing, they say. So, there is hope.
Husband and C have gone to sleep by the time I get home, so I go out to the paddock to give Loki the antibiotics and banamine. It’s a subcutaneous injection, which generally isn’t a big deal, but it’s dark, and it’s just me, and he’s really wooly. You have to pull up the skin to create a little tent or wrinkle, then inject into that area. There is a feeling of when the needle pushes past the skin and into the right space, but at this point, I literally can’t manage all of these things. So I push him against the back of the shelter, and just hope I’ve got this in the right spot. Two injections, and we’re done.
I sit on the big stump of what used to be a mighty oak tree, long since cut down, and just watch Loki. It’s about 9pm. I smell, from head to toe, of lanolin and sheep manure. Loki is standing listlessly in the corner of the shelter where I’ve left him. The stars are bright, and there is an orange sliver of a thin crescent moon peeking from the trees. For the first time in the evening, I am cold.
And in this moment, I realize I have done what I can. I have put in my full effort. The extent of my abilities have been exhausted. I want this sheep to live, but I am not one of the gods, I am just a woman on an endless journey to become a better shepherdess. And while I have learned several lessons from this particular instance, I have done my best with what I had at this moment in time.
The truth of the matter is you can stress a sheep to death. If I keep going, keep palpating, keep injecting, I run the risk of killing him just by my interference.
And so I must let go. I must stop analyzing Loki’s signs and signals, and let him work through what he can. It is now in he hands of the gods, and there is nothing I can do.
I give him a kiss on the forehead and walk up the hill to wash up. I sit in the tub, scrubbing the lanolin off of my hands and arms— admittedly, it’s one of my favorite smells— thinking about how long I should wait to go check on him. I decide I can wait until morning chores.
I sleep fitfully. I have nightmares. I have dreams. I remember the vague shapes of them when I wake up.
I skip coffee, get dressed, and dash outside just as the morning light is thinking about cresting the mountains. I walk past the barn, past my horse (“Hey big man,”) and down toward the sheep. As I round the corner, I start counting the standing sheep in the ram pen… Charlie, Headbasher, and…
… Loki, standing there eating hay. He looks up at me, baas, and then goes back to eating.
The Painted Shepherdess 