Maa-Maat and The Red Thing

This is the Red Thing. It is the most indispensable item on the farm. Two people fit very comfortably in the seat, three if you squeeze together. Three bales of hay fit perfectly in the back. It never gets stuck. It never breaks—OK one time it did and believe me, it was a nightmare. Without the Red Thing, horses would go without hay and grain. Fences would never get repaired. Eggs would never be collected. We would have to walk up and down the hill to the barn. Life would be miserable. I ride in The Red Thing.

This is Checkers. She helps bring the horses in and helps put them out. She supervises feeding, stall mucking and general chores. As you can see, she rides in The Red Thing.

This is Maa-Maat. She can do tricks. She plays her little piano and her little drum. She rings her cowbell and jumps through her hoop. She can even do a sheep version of moon walking.

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One afternoon a while back, I was down at the barn getting feed and hay ready to take to the horses in the back pastures. The lambs were out of their stall, and three of them were off grazing up on the hill. Not Maa-Maat, though. She was hanging around the barn to keep an eye out should I forget to latch the door to the feed stall.

It only takes her an instant to dash in and throw herself headfirst into the nearest open feed bag. She doesn’t care if it’s lamb feed or horse feed or poultry feed or chicken scratch. It’s all the same to her—edible. And once she gets her head in a bag, it is not easy to get her out. She stiffens up her neck and somehow manages to concentrate her weight it’s all you can do to push and pull and tug and shove her back out into the aisle.

By the time I got the grain buckets filled and sorted, she wasn’t at the front of the barn, so I figured she had given up and gone out to graze with the others. I loaded the buckets into the back of The Red Thing and tied them down. I called to Checkers, and she got in The Red Thing. I got into The Red Thing.

I started it up, put it in gear, and we were ready to go when—

Maa-Maat clambered into The Red Thing. The first thing she did was the first thing she always does. She grabbed the nearest thing, the key, and started trying to eat it.

The first thing Checkers did was jump in my lap and start barking to alert me there was a problem.

At this point, I was trying to pry open Maa-Maat’s mouth to get the key so I could turn the engine off. Since the Red Thing was in gear and running, I was also trying to hold onto Checkers so she wouldn’t slip down and hit the accelerator.

Finally, I got the key away from Maa-Maat and turned off the engine. As you can see, the floorboard isn’t very wide and Maa-Maat isn’t very narrow so there was no way she could turn around. She was going to have to walk all the way through and out the other side.

I got out.

Checkers got out.

After checking if the gear shift was edible—it wasn’t—and checking if the steering wheel was edible—it wasn’t, Maa-Maat finally got out.

Good! Disaster averted. Just to be on the safe side, I grabbed a little bit of grain and teased Maa-Maat into the barn with it. While she was busy gobbling it up, I ran to the Red Thing and got in. Checkers ran to the Red Thing and got in.

But before we could get away, Maa-Maat ran to the Red Thing and got in.

This time it went faster: I got out of the Red Thing. Checkers got out of the Red Thing. Maa-Maat got out of the Red Thing. I ran into the barn and scattered a bit more grain down the aisle then raced back to the Red Thing.

This time we made it—almost.

I came around the other end of the barn, and there she was in the middle of the road waiting for us.

I made a quick U-turn and circled around to the other end of the barn. Maa-Maat raced down the aisle, and there she was again, blocking the road.

Another U-turn. Another Maa-Maat block.

And again.

Sometimes it’s difficult to out-smart a sheep, but it’s not impossible. The next time, instead of making a U-turn and going around the barn, I made a complete 360 degree turn. As Checkers and I drove past, I could see Maa-Maat at the far end of the barn, waiting for us.

Maybe one day I'll find a way for Maa-Maat to take a ride in the Red Thing.

The Smartest Sheep in Grainger County*

*This claim is based on 1) the scarcity of sheep in Grainger County and 2) the assumption that most people have better things to do with their time than clicker train sheep.

Here's little Maa-Maat, my 6 month old Tunis lamb, showing off her tricks.

As you can see, there are no cuts in the video. This was done to show how much she enjoys performing. As a matter of fact, she usually has a little temper fit when it's time to stop.

The most complicated thing she does is the Bang the Drum trick. For this, she has to hit the feed pan with first one foot then the other. Just banging away at it with one foot doesn't work.

As for the Bow Down trick, she can also expand it to crawling along on her knees. This, however, has pretty much been eliminated from her repitroire as it just looks too creepy.

If anyone has any suggestions for additional tricks, I'd really like to hear them. My husband is after me to try to teach her to roll over, but being as she's 1) overweight and 2) a sheep, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Neither is she very well suited to retrieving items as she pretty much tries to eat anything she can fit into her mouth.

How Evil Came to Clinch Mountain

Last winter a friend gave us three Tunis ewes. (Actually it turned out to be two ewes and a wether, but that’s a completely different story.) These were our first sheep, but we had been breeding and raising horses a few years now, so how hard could it be? It's not like we were planning on breeding them or showing them or doing much of anything with them.

The plan was simple. Give them some time to get settled into their pen then start using them for herding. Bessie, our 11 year old Rottie, and I had taken herding lessons about eight years ago and both she and I enjoyed it. We were both quite a bit older now and not nearly as spry, but I thought it would be the perfect way for us to get some exercise and share a little special one-on-one activity.

Over the next couple of weeks, the sheep explored their new territory while I spent the time reading about herding, brushing Bessie up on her commands, and getting to know our new arrivals. It wasn’t long before they had names:

The ewe with the large head and gorgeous, dark face became known as Big Face.

And Dolly was perfect for the sweet looking one. (It was later necessary to re-gender this to Paulie.)

The only problem was the third one, the one with the strange eyes and the narrow face. I tried lots of names, everything from Fluffy to Snitty, but nothing felt right. It was inconvenient having an animal without a name, but I could wait. It's been my experience that if you watch and listen carefully enough, sooner or later animals will tell you their names.

Finally the time came to start herding! I don't know who was more excited, me or Bessie. It was a little chaotic at first, but then Bessie settled down and started working like she should. She’d gather them up, I’ll call her off, they’d move away and I’d send her to gather them again. She was having the time of her life and so was I.

After gathering them for about the third or fourth time, I decided it was time to take it up a notch and have Bessie move the sheep from one end of the paddock to the other. She gathered them up as before, but when she went to move them, only Big Face and Dolly started over to the far fence. Instead of moving off with the others, the ewe with the strange eyes and the narrow face turned toward Bessie, stamped her foot and refused to move. Bessie backed off, and I sent her in again. The ewe bounced forward a few steps, and Bessie again backed off.

Come on, Bessie. You’re a Rottweiler for goodness sake! Move that ewe!

Bessie charged.

The ewe dropped her head and charged.

NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

The next thing I knew, Bessie was down with the breath knocked out of her, and the ewe was backing up to have another go. Armed with nothing but panic and my flimsy plastic rattle-paddle, I ran between Bessie and the ewe. The next few seconds seemed like an eternity as the ewe and I stood our ground and glared at each other. Finally, with a shake of her head and a disdainful little snort, the ewe turned and trotted back to her friends.

The ewe with the strange eyes and narrow face now had a name. Evil she was and Evil she would remain.

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Except for a badly bruised pride, Bessie was unhurt and more than willing to have another go, but I felt we had both had enough herding for the time being. The woman who gave Evil to us offered to swap her out for something better-behaved with more dog-respect, but I turned her down. In some strange way, it seemed that this was how it was meant to be.

Maa-Maat and the Blackberry Patch

Sheep are not the most intelligent of animals. I love them to pieces, but they are just not very bright. A good example is the trouble Maa-Maat got herself into this week.

The three lambs had been out grazing around the barn for a couple of hours while I did chores in the barn. No problems at all. Everything was just as it should be, but then Maa-Maat started maat-ing very loudly. From the tone, I could tell something was wrong. Well, from the tone and the fact that Merlin and Rachael started screaming also.

When I got around to the side of the barn, I could see that Maa-Maat had managed to get herself caught in a blackberry patch on the side of a steep slope. She was in so deep that I could just barely see her head sticking out.

For any other animal, this wouldn't be such a problem. It may get a few scratches, but it would manage to push out and through the briars. For a sheep it's a bit different because 1) sheep have wool that gets caught up in the briars and 2) a sheep's brain is about the size of a very small, very dry peanut.

I managed to get part of the way down the slope and rattled a grain bucket to try to coax her out. She would struggle against the briars to come to me, then because she's a sheep with only a tiny little sheep brain, she'd get distracted by a berry and stop to eat. I'd rattle the bucket again, she'd struggle some more, then spot another berry and stop to eat. This went on for quite a while. Since I couldn't risk going any further down the slope without falling, I was pretty much at a loss as to what to do. Luckily the woman who was weedeating for us finished up and came by. Her balance was much better and she was able to scramble down the slope to Maa-Maat and help her find a way out of the briars.

It seemed that during this, Maa-Maat's thoughts went something like this: I'm trapped--Panic! Oh, that looks tasty. Help! Help! Wait, is that another blackberry? Yummy. PANIC! PANIC!

She's not unusual. From what I've seen, sheep have incredibly short attention spans. In this day and age when we are told to "live in the moment," sheep have gone all of us one better--They live in the second.

All in all, not a bad thing.....

As long as you stay away from the blackberry patch.

Maa-Maat and Friends

Maa-Maat is a little Tunis ewe. Her mother, Evil, was very sick when she was born and died shortly afterwards. Because of this Maa-Maat has been completely hand-reared. The picture was taken when she was only a few days old. She was born early and had very little wool, hence the sweater.

She's now about three months old and is doing fine. The only problem we have with her is that she is a little more than just slightly overweight. I've been doing some clicker training with her, and so far she knows to jump up on a bale of straw, kneel down and crawl a short distance, and jump through a hoop. Her "jump through a hoop" isn't all that great because...well...she's not all that great a jumper. Did I mention the weight problem?

In addition to Maa-Maat, we have two other lambs, Merlin and Rachael. Merlin is a little black Welsh mountain wether (castrated male) and Rachael is a Jacob ewe. In the mornings and evenings, the three of them line up at their stall door for me to put their collars on. Once they have their collars, they go out to graze or explore or whatever.

Although they don't come when called, they will come if I rattle a grain bucket. They also come running down the center aisle of the barn periodically just to check if I have any treats for them.