Tiffany hates it when I say it this simply, but our lambs grew up in our house. She feels it brings up images of the lambs running wild and mass amounts of urine and feces around the house. That last part was not the case, but the truth is, especially for Maple, that they lived in the house. It was quite a while before we were comfortable letting Maple outside by herself. She just followed us around the house, and tried to eat the indoor plants if we turned our back on her.

As a result, the lambs are more like puppies than they are like livestock… especially Maple who was babied even longer. One might think that Yeager would be the more babied, since he showed signs of illness his first week and I was unsure if he would make it. Obviously he did, and he is the one who is most likely to be a pain in the butt… quite literally (he likes to play, and his favorite game is head-butting). It’s hard to believe that our original plan was to have these sheep processed. Now we would be devastated if anything bad happened to them.

After they moved to pens in the field, I would spend about an hour each morning sitting in an armchair reading while the grazed. If they got too far away from me, I would hear the sound of small cloven hooves racing across the ground and have my book nuzzled out of my hands in order to free them from scratching necks and faces. I don’t normally sit out there anymore. I feel they need to learn to behave like livestock. However, special circumstances allow for special treatment I guess.

It is not uncommon when the grass is growing well for my neighbors to close their front gate and let their horses out to graze their yards. Our previous lamb pens were right up against the fence that separates their yards from our… well… what we loosely call our fields. The horses enjoyed grazing right up to the fence, and then looking over to see if by any chance the grass really was greener on the other side (spoiler alert… it isn’t). This had the unexpected effect of scaring the bejeezus out of the lambs. They were just running along the length of the fences, and bawling every time they saw me.

So, I reverted to my old standby, except I didn’t take a lawn chair, I just used an inverted bucket. I decided to sit in Maple’s pen and sit in the shade of the peach tree. It is very close to the boundary fence that separates the lambs from each other (no hanky-panky). She grazed in a circle that ended two feet from me, and Yeager grazed as close as he could on his side of the fence. Every now and then they would each lay down and chew their cuds, but Maple spent a tremendous amount of time with her face in my face (see picture above). If I stopped scratching her, she would start pawing at me with one of her front legs.

This continued for almost an hour until they both started showing signs of being comfortable. I don’t know if it had any lasting effect. A few days later I built a new pen for their rotation, and they are far away from the horses. It will probably take another three washes to get all the lamb hair off of my clothes.