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“Girl, Just Keep Your Legs Together, And All Will Be Well!”
Good advice for any female, at any stage in her life, although the context may change as she ages.
As I recently entered my eighth decade on this earth (for those of you in Rio Linda, that means I just turned 70 a couple of months ago), the context these days relates mostly to my life on the farm, because that’s where I spend the very great majority of my time.
Every evening, I trot (well, maybe I don’t trot anymore; maybe I just “totter,” or “stagger,” or perhaps I “wander in a desultory fashion”) down to the barn with a small bucket of grain, to call the sheep in for the night. I didn’t used to do this, but a few years ago I had a couple of ugly coyote incidents which ended badly, and I decided I didn’t want to live through those again, so I try to keep the troops safe by bringing them back to base camp in the evening. Generally, they’re very up for this, and anxious to get to their nightly feast.
Sometimes, they’re too anxious.
After ending up flat on my bum night after night, with the bucket’s contents raining down around me while the buggers foraged around, through, and sometimes within me, I finally figured it out.
Don’t give them an inch!
The inch (or perhaps two or three) that I regularly gave them was that inch or more between my legs, as I entered the arena, moved normally and energetically around (because I am a fairly normal and energetic person), took the latch off the gate, approached the feeders, thrust the scoop into the grain bucket and then shook its contents into the feeder.
Almost every time, I ended up with a couple of (very friendly, let’s be clear) sheep’s heads between my thighs, staring lovingly up at me, hoping for an extra bit of treat. The 150 or 225 pounds they each carried forward while moving towards the feeder, still between my legs, usually upended me, with the especial thrill, from those with horns, of the impression of several dime-sized and painful bruises presenting themselves on my inner thighs a day or two later. I don’t forget. And thank goodness I never ended up in the hospital for any reason where I might have had to explain such awkward presences.
My eventual (and ultimately dispositive) conclusion was that I must have been doing something wrong, and that striding about openly and freely, “like an Egyptian,” (let’s hear it for the liberated peoples of several thousand years ago B.C.) might not have been such a good idea:
So I decided to restrain myself. To try “walking like a lady” as my English Granny, with all her repressive ideas, had instructed me to:
Head up and level, shoulders down, legs together.
Know what? It worked!
They get their treats, and I get to stay on my feet, with my dignity intact.
Who could have guessed?
Peregrinate. And maunder from time to time, as a change of pace.
Avoid sashaying, unless you’re feeding the chickens.
Yeah, perambulating will keep Them from stampeding.
Mrs. Nohaaj has similar experiences with pushy horses, who are always STARVING. She tries to pre-stage the feed buckets before the horses are called. Other wise, with their sheer mass, and obvious state of under nourishment, their gentle push towards food can be very harrowing, if she is still fussing with it.
We now have 5 horses on the property, four are hers, one is a friend’s. The fifth horse is a very slow muncher, and also needs the most supplement. She has to isolate that horse from the others, so they don’t steal her grains, and other wise harass her while she still has grains, and all the others are finished. (HEY, (HAY?) share with us, We are bigger, SHARE!)
Makes the feeding time more of a challenge.
Fortunately, the horses are Mrs. Nohaaj’s passion, and she embraces the process. I support on the fringes…
Where is the “Love” button for this comment?
I can so identify with this since damaging an achilles tendon in July. I’m thankful that the most dangerous critters I have to deal with are chickens.
Cheers to the headline writer of this post!
Truly! It combines selling and compelling!
Side note: around the time I first moved to Los Angeles, the cheerleading squad of the LA Rams was called “The Embraceable Ewes”. That’s about all I know about animal husbandry.
We had sheep on our farm while I was growing up (and horses and beef cattle and chickens and turkeys and pigs…), but we didn’t have your problem because my Dad had arranged the feeders right next to the fences – we didn’t have to go into the sheep area to feed them, but just tipped the buckets over the fence. Are you able to do something like that? I hate to think of anyone being alone on a farm who has to engage with animals like you’re having to do.
Thanks, that’s an excellent idea, and I have tried that. My feeders don’t really work well, though, as they have troughs on each side and are about 40″ wide. So when I put them along the fence, the sheep can’t access the one side, and I have to chuck the grain across and into the far trough, which–if my aim isn’t perfect, wastes a lot of it either on the ground or it ends up in the middle of the feeder or in the trough closest to the fence where they can’t get to it.
I don’t regard the activity as dangerous these days. It was more problematic when we had about 100 sheep and goats, including rams and bucks. The boys could get a bit stroppy, especially at certain times of the year when they thought I was down there trying to prevent them from courting and enjoying their lady friends. Those were the days when I used to keep an 18″ 2×4 handy to whack them between the eyes. (That only works when they approach you from the front though. It was a time when eyes in the back of my head would have been helpful.)
Most of the sheep I still have are quite affable. All of them have names. Any boy lambs I kept had a little chat with the vet. Some of them were bottle babies I raised in the house:
So I feel quite safe down there with them, even when they try to get me in the saddle and take me for a ride, as I described in the post.
She, you’re a hoot!
As I approach my ninth decade in a few short months I have had a lot more disconcerting losses of balance, and a few plops in the process. In most cases the cause is one of my labradors, two at present. As an alpinist I have always possessed a cat like ability to remain standing or to make midair recoveries. Not so much anymore.
My five month old labrador puppy is proving to me the wisdom of several friends of the same generation in their declarations that when their current pets passed on they would not replace them. When I lost one of my older dogs in August I went back to the breeder from whom I had bought two previous pups and was fortunate (maybe not so fortunate) to come just in time to obtain one from a new litter.
She is a doll, but she is a puppy endowed with all of the satanic qualities puppies normally possess. One in particular is constantly being underfoot or attacking my socks, my shoe laces, or the hems at the bottom of my jeans. Due to a pinched nerve in my lumbar spine I am a bit less agile than in times past, so recovering balance is not my strong suit. I think one can say that the real challenge in old age isn’t so much keeping your legs together as remaining upright on two feet.
This is Natasha, about 25 pounds and capable of speed of light movements and transitions.
That brings back memories! It seemed like most every year, there would be some lambs that were raised in the house, bottle-fed by my Mom.
I have six chickens. My chicken adventure began with a hen and a rooster I found, half-frozen, in the middle of the road, while I was out on a walk at the end of January 2021. The hen, who wasn’t well, didn’t make it, but the rooster did.
I named him Chinggis, after the Great Khan.
I’d wanted chickens for a while, and just never got around to it, but this forced my hand, and over the next few months a neighbor donated two old hens to the cause, and my veterinarian came up with another two elderly ladies which she was happy to give me. And for two years, I enjoyed marvelous brown eggs, usually four a day, although fewer for a few months in the winter when there are fewer hours of daylight, something that’s important for egg production. I could have bumped up their production with artificial lighting, but that’s really “not who I am,” as a former President might have put it.
Eventually, though the ladies either stopped laying or died of old age (or both), one after another, and now there’s only one left.
And Chinggis.
So in August of 2023 I took the plunge and purchased four peeps from Tractor Supply. I was quite nervous (such tiny little things!), but managed to raise them all to adulthood, starting with the several weeks they spent in a water trough in my spare bedroom:
They’re “Easter Eggers,” and two of them lay brown eggs, and two of them lay blue-green eggs. They’re beautiful. So are their eggs.
But this left me with a dilemma: It’s quite a challenge to integrate disparate chicken personalities from different flocks, and they can be vicious if they decide they don’t like each other. So I built the elderly Chinggis and his remaining partner, Mrs. Precious Ramotswe, what I call the Independent Living Facility (ILF), a 4’x4′ coop with attached run, and plunked them in it. The four younger ladies occupy the bigger coop up the hill.
All this is a roundabout way of getting to my point.
A few weeks ago, I went outside to let the chickens out, and there was a lot of thumping coming from the ILF. I snuck up to see what was going on, and discovered this:
Sorry about the quality, but it was just one of those things where I wanted to capture the moment (usually I miss them because I’m obsessing about the reflections, or the sound, or the mess, or whether or not I’ve intruded into the frame, or the fact they’re not perfect, but this time I just went for it).
What I find most charming about this is the effort he’s expending to show off his moves to his girlfriend, and how serenely uninterested she is in the whole performance.
Thank you. That might be the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in the past decade…
Another memory that floats back has to do with my life before I retired, and when I still used to shear my own sheep every year.
I’d come into the office of a Monday, bruised and lame, and the first of my co-workers who saw me would lift an eyebrow and say “sheep-shearing again?”
I was a fairly competent shearer, but we didn’t have enough sheep, and I didn’t get enough practice, to really perfect the technique.
The Angora goats (which we raised from the late 1980s until about 2000) were the worst, though. Both sheep and goats believe that shearing is a process designed to kill them. The sheep (because they’re sheep) often go passive, and just wait for the ax to fall.
To be clear, this doesn’t make the process easy: Manhandling (or Womanhandling in my case) a couple hundred pounds of dead weight, while trying to reach every part of its body with a pair of cutters that could be deadly (to you or the sheep) if you make a wrong move, is still a challenge, even if the “victim” has largely given up.
But the goats! They were not going down without a fight. They’d struggle from start to finish. Hooves like knives. Horns like bludgeons.
I loved the goats.
Pete the goat. He was just a baby here.
When my son first started raising sheep (meat animals) a few years ago he quickly discovered how vigorously they went for the feed pail with no mercy to any person holding it.
As we begin an effort to shrink government, we should keep that lesson in mind.
And the 100 meter mosey.
When we were raising sheep we would always bring the sheep to the barn lot at night. Even though we had pyrs, I didn’t want to risk coyotes. When we were feeding grain, I would put the grain out before I went to call them up. Then I would put a handful of rocks in the empty bucket. It made a louder racket when shaken and they fell for it every time! I never got run over, though.
What follows is Odo (the big guy in the above photo) as a puppy, after he’d disgraced himself on the kitchen floor. I just love the way that when I–in my ‘Nanny from Hell’ voice, while trying not to laugh–say his name, his ears twitch, and that, when I say, “Look at me,” he actually does. Otherwise, he’s doing his best to make it clear he has no idea who befouled the floor, but that he’s going to look all over the place and help me find the miscreant who actually is responsible….
And here’s “little horse,” Xuxa, also as a puppy:
My love affair with Great Pyrenees goes back to Levi, the dog who ran away from the farm up the road and came to visit me so often that–eventually–the farmers just gave him to me. Up until that point, I’d always thought that–should I ever have the resources and the space, I’d love to have a couple of Newfoundlands. That fantasy ended, shortly after I met my “Guardians at the Gate.”
Gosh, they are hardy, smart and dedicated. Casper the Georgia GP killed 8 coyotes and almost lost his life in defense of his flock a couple of years ago.
I don’t really “work” my current two (Odo and Xuxa) as guard dogs, but I have no doubt they’d do the job if needed. Right now, they’re focused on taking care of me.
To the point that–when I upended myself on the brick steps in July of 2023, on my way back up to the house after feeding the sheep, I threw out my left arm to save myself, scraped my left elbow on the wall as I went down and then (I eventually figured out) was thumped on the back of the head by the large flowerpot which fell off the ledge.
I don’t think I knocked myself out, but I did lie there for a few minutes pondering my plight and undergoing the ministrations of the very worried, 150lb, Odo. After he’d given me a thorough licking all over, and had stood on, and pawed at, my chest a few times (not sure if he was trying to keep me safe and prevent me from repeating the performance, or if he was trying to administer CPR), I decided that if I didn’t get up and head into the house I’d either bleed to death on the bricks or end up squashed and suffocated by the dog.
Net, net, when I finally brought myself to look in the mirror, I looked like a character from a slasher movie. (Head wounds do bleed to excess, but the thing itself wasn’t actually all that significant.) I checked out my eyes in all the relevant ways, decided I wasn’t concussed, had a cold shower to slow down and help clot the bleeding, and went to bed.
The next afternoon, I was treated for a broken wrist and, after a lengthy course of physical therapy, all was, and is, well. More annoying even than the break was the fact that–unbeknownst to me at the time–I’d planted my hand, when I fell, into a large patch of poison ivy. It took a few days to announce itself, but eventually it did so. Misery dripping. LOL.
My rule is “leaves of green, let it be.” But then I found Zanfel. It’s a bit pricey, but I’d pay ten times what they sell it for. It wipes out the rash. Before I found Zanfel, poison ivy would stay with me for months, creating huge festering lumpy rashes that never seemed to stop spreading. I highly recommend it. With Zanfel not only does it have tiny beads that you gloriously rub across your itchy skin, which feels great, but it stops the allergic reaction cold.
Magnificent dogs, and so familiar in the response to disciplining. Despite all of the aggravation, I cannot imagine my life without my dogs, particularly now my puppy who is a constant source of grief and pleasure.
When my wife and I stayed at your place, I remember one of those buggers, maybe this one, standing not far outside the window, motionless, giving me the “evil eye.” It was very disconcerting.
They can be very focused, when they set their little minds to it.
I’d never really thought about the matter before I became a landowner (what a grandiloquent term for my 30 acres!!) myself, but most prey animals like sheep, goats, and deer have their eyes positioned out towards the sides of their heads, and their eyes have almost-rectangular (like a letterbox) pupils. (Rabbits don’t have quite the same degree of rectangularity, but their eyes are positioned the same way.)
All this is to give them a much wider field of vision and excellent depth perception, which mitigates somewhat the advantage that predators (such as wolves and humans), with their forward-facing and highly-directed eyes with round pupils, have in nature.
This:
versus this:
Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
Nature is amazing.
Those rectangular pupils on goats always struck me as creepy.
And those hooves! Just like Satan!
So they have “landscape” vision rather than “portrait!”
I must have “portrait” vision. I never cared much for landscapes.