Lamb docking

Yesterday I had a quintessential New Zealand Farm experience and docked lamb's tails! One of the master's students in my department has a family farm north of Wellington, and he invited a load of us out to the farm to help out. Every spring the new lambs need to have their tails shortened so they don't collect poo and get sick with flies (called flystrike). The tails get bobbed with a cauterizing iron, then heal into that cute bob we're all familiar with.




A carload of us headed out at the crack of dawn to the farm, me with my coffee thermos and new steel-toed gumboots in hand. There were several hundred head of lamb, and we worked through them doing a number of tasks. In addition to the tail docking, the male lambs (rams) needed to be castrated and all the lambs got their ears clipped in a specific pattern to signify what sex they are and which farm they come from.


I took a turn at all the different jobs. I was pretty bad at castration - I couldn't keep the testicles in the scrotum while putting the rubber band around them, which led to lots of feeling around the lambs' scrotums (see photo), which led to lots of jokes about "hadn't I had enough yet?". So I moved on to collecting the lambs in the pen (aw lamb cuddles... and kicks to the face), and then to docking ears, which I was really good at, but gave me monster blisters and ended up with me covered in blood from the squirters.

Eventually I tried out docking the tails. Since it's done with a cauterizing iron it smells quite strongly of burning flesh, and takes a bit of strength to get through the flesh and bone. After the tail's off and on the pile, you've got to grab the lamb's leg and spray it with disinfectant, then sling it off the slide so it lands on its feet. After doing several I was pretty tired, but at that point we were pretty well done for the day.

Afterwards we threw some of the tails on the fire and ate them - pretty greasy meat and not much there but tasty all the same.

I had a great time! I finished up with my pants ripped from crossing a fence and covered in blood and crap. It felt so good to be out in the sun for a day, working and laughing in the middle of nowhere.

Some of my friends expressed surprised that I would participate in the "mutilation of lambs". To them I say that I didn't see any treatment of animals that seemed inappropriate. Livestock kept to generate a family's livelihood needs to be kept in the hundreds at least, and that scale necessitates a certain treatment of the stock. Bottom line: they aren't pets, so they won't be treated as such. But they are kept in a way that tries to prevent stress to the animals as much as possible, if nothing else because a stressed animal is not a good investment.


I would gladly go out and work on the farm again, and I'm definitely looking forward to getting out and about more now that spring is in the air.