I decided to do a little investigating to figure out why our lambs are apparently so defective. So I took a look around, talked to Lindsay (the farm manager here), and did some research, and this is what I found:
One of the first things I noticed was that everyone else's lambs looked a lot leaner than ours. My first thought, therefore, was that we must overfeed our lambs, making them too fat to fetch premium prices. But then I found out that, in fact, most commercial producers feed only grain, while we feed smaller amounts of grain supplemented by alfalfa and grass hay. Grain is much more energy- and nutrient-dense than hay, so how can grain-fed sheep be leaner? Without getting way into it, it basically comes down to the anatomy of ruminant digestion: sheep are ruminants, so they have four stomach compartments (like cattle), and they're designed to eat grass and forage, which is why we feed them hay- it's what their system was made for. Feeding grain leads to faster weight gain and leaner-looking lambs, but it also leads to problems like acidosis- a painful condition where the rumen produces too much acid because it can't really deal with all that grain. Feeding hay makes the lambs look fatter (but not more muscular) because hay-fed lambs have more developed rumens, which makes it look like they have pot bellies. So while it's better for the health of the sheep to feed a balanced mixture of grain and hay, it isn't really to the advantage of the producer to put the sheep's health first.
The other thing I noticed is that commercial producers tend to do short docking, which w
e don't do. Docking is tail removal, and the reason sheep get docked is to prevent all kinds of gunk (feces, for instance) from getting caught in the wool on the sheep's rump. In the wild, of course, sheep wouldn't have docked tails and they'd do just fine, but wild sheep haven't been bred for generations and generations with the purpose of producing massive wool coats, so there's less of a problem with matting and things like that.The p
rocedure on the campus farm is to make the cut between the third and fourth coccygeal vertebrae, so that there is something of a tail left over (above). In short docking, you make the cut much, much higher so that there is virtually no tail left (left). Producers say that this allows them to highlight the lamb's rump and legs (the most expensive cuts of meat), which I guess it does; but it also dramatically increases the risk of nerve damage during docking and can cause vaginal and rectal prolapses. A lot of times these prolapses only occur when the animal is lying down, and when it stands up, everything sort of pops back into place, but that doesn't mean that it's not a problem! I mean, when your insides are outside, it's definitely a problem.So I'm not trying to make excuses for the fact that our lambs sold for really lousy prices, it's just that I realized how messed up this whole thing is: it's a luxury for us on the campus farm that we can choose to treat our animals well, because we don't have to turn a profit. But other people do, and if consumers aren't willing to pay more for their sheep products, then what are the producers supposed to do? I honestly don't know. Well, actually, no: people should seriously stop with the short docking, there's no excuse, the idea that it looks better is totally artificial. In terms of the grain vs. hay feeding dilemma, I don't want to condemn producers for doing what they think they have to do to stay afloat financially, but more than that I hate the idea that anything can be justified in the name of making a profit.
Rectal prolapse = gross and (shocking!) unhealthy
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