Well, the weather has had a serious change of personality and suddenly we are winter again. As we write today’s blog (midnight) we have driving rain and 40 mile an hour winds out there. The daylight weather was not much better and as luck would have it (NOT!!), today was the day we had Rachel from Market Vets here to castrate the lambs and castrate and de-horn our bull-calf. The lamb part of the afternoon went well in that we had all the sheep in the field shelter and so kept dry. The cow part meant having the bull-calf in the crush in the rain whilst mum and the rest of the herd bellowed in annoyance from the race. The good news however was that collecting the cows from the 3-acre, walking them up through the 4-acre (we created a corridor using electric wire – not connected) and getting them into the Collecting Area went incredibly smoothly – we get ever more confident about TB testing day when it goes well like this. (The photo incidentally is NOT from today...) We talked about castration way back in the spring and all the different methods. We banded our goats (and hated it) but struggled with the sheep as 2 out of our first 3 lambs had, at the time, un-descended testicles and as such we couldn't band them anyway. Today Rachel used a burdizzo tool (clamp) that crushes the blood vessels leading to the testicles. It sound hideous but is in fact the most humane way of castrating. The animal has local anesthetic and so does not feel the clamp and then it is given pain relief. Whilst you can give pain relief when an animal is banded, the pain relief will wear off but of course the band remains in place and as such there will still be some discomfort! The de-horning is similarly straightforward: local anesthetic, snipping the horn buds, cauterizing the hole and then antibiotic spray and pain relief… At the end of the day, both these procedures are all about ‘management’. Male animals without testicles and horns will be calmer and safer to be around, they can be kept with females and there is a school of thought that suggests the meat tastes better too!!! There are benefits for the animal but only really because of the way we want to keep them. This is farming we guess!