It’s been a long day of breedings as both Jaquinto and Tulaco Centurion are home at the moment. Quite a few rejections and scans but a few very annoying open girls. While we were at it we weaned three six month old cria who were all over 30 kilos and put in quite a few ear tags on those that are over a month old. We found a foot with a nasty swelling on it that turned out to be full of puss. Chas’s favourite job is the eradication of pus. She went away cleaned up with a lovely blue foot and walking on it quite nicely. We are slowly working through the Jaquinto maidens getting them mated to Centurion. We had more girls last year but this year it seems to be very close to 50:50. The show team have been banged up in the barn since yesterday afternoon. Just as well because we had some serious rain this morning. We realised the girls hadn’t been on halters since the Royal Bath & West in June so a bit of hasty halter training this afternoon.
Yesterday Joshua and I went to the South Molton recycling centre. This place is full of stuff, loads of hideous ornaments, furniture, plates, mugs, decanters, clothes and a room full of books. The prices were a bit high though. There were two old brown, cracked, mixing bowls and they were asking £5 each for them. Why would you buy a cracked one anyway when you can get a new one for £6.95 in Rainbow. We were not impressed by the charity shops, Tiverton’s are miles better.
We were falling about when we came upon The Arthritics Cookbook by Dr Dong, sounds like one of those U Flung Dung jokes but no, it was for real. You get to laughing about the afflicted after several hours of shopping for J’s supplies at university. Then on the way home on the bridge on the link road near Tiverton we saw two bunches of flowers tied to the railings which usually denotes some hideous accident. Next to them also tied to the railings was a can of Special Brew. Not sure quite how to respond…but I’m afraid we laughed. It was like one of those moments when your nearest and dearest are doubled up in agony after dropping something heavy on their foot and all you can do is stand there and giggle.
lesley beazer –
i was wondering how many matings a macho can handle in a year? i read in Sheep Farmer last week that in Australia a ram is expected to cover 150 ewes. in Britain a ram is expected to cover 50.
Rachel –
Our experienced stud males do two or three matings a day but they can do up to five. We woujld normally work the males four or five days a week at most but once the breeding season is underway that drops off sharply as they are mostly doing rejections. There are some statistics on how many matings a male can do effectively. Walter Bravo, Murray Fowler and Jane Vaughan have all done research on this.