Category: Animals

Mom and Dad have a new baby llama.  It is up with the sheep at Grandma’s and is cute as she can be.

A family photo…mom, dad, and baby!

Randy and I have dibs on her, but I don’t think Dad is going to part with her.  We were in hopes of handling her a lot to get her to be very friendly and tame.  We will see if we can make it up to Grandma’s enough to make that happen or not.

Bo

 

He’s are playful little cutie.

His motor is always rumbling.

Bandit is our sweetheart.  He is always at your feet tugging on your pant leg with his front paws.

Roxie is our tubby girl.  She has a crush on Cooter and is constantly at the food bowl trying to keep up with him.

Murphy was the first kitten we brought home.  He likes to be loved on, but doesn’t like to be held.

One board on our pool deck is warped allowing them entrance under the deck.  This is where Pudgy found himself for two days when he refused to come out when we locked everyone up.  Foxie is in the blackberry brambles looking startled, and Pudgy and Max are taking off toward the road.  Max got in trouble for getting in the road on more than one occasion.

Stewart is headed under.  Yeah I see you!

And the man of the cat house……

Cooter

He’s such a photogenic little kittie.

He just loves having his picture taken.

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

We had another little ram lamb last night.  I took some pictures of the little guy when he was still very new to the world.

See how his mama is trying to get him all cleaned up.

This little guy is a Dorper ram lamb.  We borrowed a Dorper ram from Dad so we could get a few more Dorpers on our farm.  Mama and baby are both doing well.   

They are calling for snow today and tomorrow.  Hopefully everyone stays warm through it all.  So far the girls have been good about getting into the building and out of the elements.  Hope it continues to go well.

Gotcha! 

Yesterday we had a bouncing baby boy LAMB in our lot when I got home from work.  The mama  was WI-ld and didn’t think she needed to go into a lambing pen.  Finally I got her into the pen with her baby, got her stripped (removing the waxy plug from each ewe teat), and ran to Dad’s to get alfalfa since we haven’t gotten our’s yet.  When I got home with her hay I noticed she still hadn’t let the little guy nurse.  He was crying and everytime he tried to nurse she bolted.  She has a ton of milk, but wasn’t quite sure she wanted the baby to nurse her.  Finally after some hands-on convincing/wrestling I was able to hold her still long enough for the baby to nurse.  He was quick to pick it up, and I could feel her relax a bit.  I loosened my grip on her, but still didn’t leave until I knew he had gotten enough. 

Everyone seemed content and happy at midnight when I went out to check on them and then again this morning.  Mama and baby will stay locked up two full days to make sure they bond.

I’m in hopes my brother or Dad can swing in later this morning and around lunchtime to make sure everyone is okay.  Now that it has begun we will have to enlist others to help us out.  Randy has a friend, Dan, who is so great to us when we are lambing.  He stops by throughout the day to make sure everyone is okay and calls to give us an update.

This is a big year for us lambing with about 60 ewes bred.  I am cutting my hours at work again so I can be home a little more, but they will still be left alone three days a week.  Dan is so great to lend a hand those three days when we can’t be there.

Hopefully the remainder of lambing season goes as well as yesterday!

With negative temperatures for most of the week our dogs were going a little stir crazy being cooped up inside.  It finally warmed up enough over the weekend for it to be safe outside on the north side of our house for us to play ball with them and run them a bit.

However, it didn’t matter how much ball we played or how much attention we gave…..this little girl had some problems this weekend.

When she’s not following Randy around with her football in her mouth barking….yes she can bark with a ball in her mouth…

she is following me around with her football in her mouth barking. 

Notice the pinch collar (Thank You Dogfather), this is to help with her incessant barking.  Cruel you say?  Someday I will upload a video of this little beauty barking at us for no apparent reason.  For a taste of what we experience in an evening, witness the bark of any blue heeler and you will feel a fraction of our pain.

Besides the barking….

And pawing….

And licking…

And feet chasing…

Those we can deal with…those we’ve learned to tolerate.  It’s the destruction we have a problem with. 

Last night we had just turned off the lights to go to sleep when we heard a sort of ripping sound.  Ash sometimes gets rolled over on her back and in the process of right-ing herself she scratches the surrounding walls or basket near her bed.  We figured this was the case and ignored it until we heard it again.  Randy grabbed the flashlight by his bedside and flipped it on to see this little princess with her dog bed bunched up in between her paws tearing it apart.  There was stuffing and fabric pieces in between her paws, and she was panting from the exertion of it all.  Did I mention she’s seven?  That’s seven years old…not months…not weeks…YEARS.  We’ve done the puppy stage.  It should be long gone by now. 

Randy flew out of bed so fast she didn’t even see him coming.  He ripped the bed out from under her, threw the dog bed in the closet, yelled at her that she had once again been a “bad dog,” and back to bed he came.  One minute little missy is having a hay day tearing her bed to shreds, the next she is forced to sleep on the ol’ hard floor.  Life is tough at our house.  Especially for cow dogs. 

Problem is she doesn’t get it.  She probably gnawed on the carpet or the leg of my full-length mirror or one of her brothers the rest of the night, who knows.  We could give her bed back to her tonight or a year from now and chances are she will tear it up that very night. 

She’s a trainwreck, a monster, a disaster, but as Randy would say, “she’s my baby girl.”  We love her even if we can’t express it at the exact moment of her mishaps.  She’s a lemon in the world of blue heelers, but she’s our lemon.  We will find a way to curb her behavior or curb our tolerance of her behavior and look back at her antics and laugh as we already do over all the stories we have of our baby girl.

Hope this makes everyone’s dog seem a little more well mannered than they were before reading this post.  Have a great day!

I can’t believe the animals I have seen outside.  We are firm believers in taking care of your pets or not having them at all.  Now if you have a Great Pyrenees or Husky this post may not be for you. 

Randy was driving to work this morning and saw a lab hunkered down along the side of the road.  He was nearly an hour away from home and called me not knowing what to do.  Long story short he didn’t turn around to try to capture the dog.  There was a house nearby, we already have 3 dogs (2 are rescues) and 11 cats (10 of them recent rescues), and he really needed to get to work and couldn’t afford the repercussions of being late.  At what point do we make ourselves stop?  At what point do we say enough is enough?  We don’t know if we will ever get to that point.  Randy is just sick now.  He’s afraid he will see the dog hit along the side of the highway on his way home.  Our his owners sick about their missing dog?  What was he doing out on a night where windchills were in the negatives?  Along a busy highway?

Randy told me if he sees it this afternoon on his way home there is no question whether or not he will stop.  He said is stomach just hurt when he saw the dog there along the side of the road.   I know exactly how he felt.  Awhile back I saw four dogs devouring roadkill along the side of the highway on the way home.  I cried all the way home.  How can people do this?  Toss them out along the side of the road to fend for themselves?  I will never know, thank goodness.  I look at Thai, our third rescue, and wonder how someone could look into his eyes and drive away as he sits along the side of a road somewhere.  Or how someone could dump Koal, our second rescue, and his brother at 12 weeks old along the side of a paved road under a broke down car.  I don’t get it and pray I never do.

I don’t know if there will ever be a stopping point for us.  I don’t know if there can be.  On rare occassions like this where we do pass up the opportunity to help a stray it eats at us just like it is eating at Randy now.  The initial vetrinarian expenses, the risk to our other animals at home, food, the fact that we keep our dogs inside (four dogs in the house?), and continued vetrinary and preventative care.  These are all things that race through our minds when we debate on if we can take on yet another animal.  Being in the midst of an adoption and the expenses involved there doesn’t help matters.  So for now we are still holding steady at three fur balls in our home, but who knows.

If we hadn’t stopped along the way we would have missed out on some of the sweetest moments in our life:

Thai

Randy and Thai snuggling

Ash has a licking fetish when it comes to Randy

Sometimes enough is enough

Lots of snuggling and sometimes a little jealousy

They are sneaky too

Cat naps

Playtime

Where Ash goes to hide when I’m vacuuming

Koal getting cozy

Thai with his bear

They are not perfect…never have been…probably never will be.  They have went to the bathroom on the floor, puked on the floor, chewed up things that mattered, and chewed up things that didn’t matter.  They bark, they bite, they get on your furniture, they sneak into your bed, they rub their wet noses on your clean pants, and leave dog hair on your black sweater.  They’ve killed cats, injured sheep, and countless other critters around our farm.  We’ve heard the trite, “I’d get rid of ’em!”   “I’d shoot ’em!” more than we care to acknowledge.  But we don’t “get rid of ’em” and we don’t “shoot ’em.”  We patch things up.  We build better fence.  We order training collars and work on training and obedience.  Most importantly, we give them attention, so they don’t feel the need to do bad things to get attention or act hyper and crazy because they don’t get out of their pen for more than a few minutes a week (if they are lucky). 

They are our’s…for better or worse…’til death do us part.

Take care of your pets in the cold winter days ahead.  Bring them inside or into your garage with a dog house or bed to keep them off the cold concrete.  Keep them somewhere they aren’t exposed to the elements.  Love them and treat them well.  They are a member of your family and your responsibility now.

Have a wonderful day and stay warm!

We got the little lamb back around 5:30 last night. He had gone off his food again, and once I had looked him over realized his mouth had gone cold, a sign hypothermia had set in once again. Randy and I took his temperature, 97.4 degrees. His temperature should have been 100-103 degrees. I quickly got a warm water bottle on his belly; a shot of dextrose warmed and administered, and used the blow dryer to warm him up. We got his temperature up, used a feeding tube to get 4 ounces of milk replacer down him, and tucked him into a bed of towels and hot water bottles. We were up at 11:00 pm to tube him and change out his water bottles. His breathing was very labored, and we could hear the rattle in his chest from fluid building up. We gave him excenel for the pneumonia setting in and went back to bed praying for the best. At 4:00 am we got up, tubed him, changed out his bedding and water bottles and left for work.

Randy planned to call Dan, the owner, to have him head over to our house around 11:00 am to change out his water bottles and possibly have Dad go tube feed him if needed. Dan never answered Randy’s many phone calls this morning, so I called up my brother at the last minute to have him run down and change them out before they turned cold and froze the little guy to death.

It was too late. The little lamb we were caring for had died. My brother was so good to take care of him for us. We tried so hard, but he was just too malnourished and had been too cold for too long.  It’s always so heartbreaking though.