Just another Day on the Farm

Well its that time of year, the frosts are here, the main lambing season is only two months away, and just as in spring, fall rountine foot care was required. Now my pastures are soft on the feet, not alot of rocks or rough ground, even worse as they are mainly river loam, when it rains it can get quite wet to boot.

Now you can go online and see some really overgrown hoof photos, Thankfully I don’t have anything like that at my place, however some sheep seem to just have better feet, and strangely enough, you can have two or three good ones and one long or overgrown on the same animal. So if you do one foot, and think.. its looks good, don’t assume that the other three are the same, you need to check them all.

I am going to show a typical foot and its trim in photos, and then show one of my own personal overgrown foot and its trim, I think you will be able to see the difference in the photo’s I have taken.

So the first thing is to pick a pen to move the flock into, you want it big enough that the flock has room to be calm on one side, big enough that you have a work space area to two adults plus a sheep, and yet small enough that you don’t have to waste alot of energy trying to catch your sheep, now maybe you have hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars to spend on the proper equipment and if you do.. that awesome and it will make your life easier, but this one is for those that want to do it as cheaply as possable..

So lead your sheep in with grain to keep everyone as calm as possable, we don’t want to stress expecting mothers any more then we have to, put your rope over their head and once caught, have your second person straddle them if they are a little wild or just hold and talk to them if they have been though this a few times and understand that it won’t hurt them.  The trimmer is going to pull the marker and add the war paint to the sheeps head, so that you know who is done and who is not done at a glance.

Now the trimmer is going to lift the foot up and back, you have to help hold the sheep in balance, kind of lean into the sheep to help keep them stable and also to help the holder, most of the feet will look like this.. As you can see in the photo keep the foot close to the sheep’s body, if you try and pull it outwards, the sheep will fight more, as they feel unbalanced.

Now you take your trimmers closed and run it up the middle of one of each side to clean it out, can’t see anything and be able to judge how much to trim until you get it cleaned out, it can be packed in there fairly good, other times its in there lightly, so start gentle and work your way up in power on the push out.

Now ideally once you have cleaned out the center, you will see that the sides have a lift on them, you can see this very clearly on the above photo, its the rise above the level part of the hoof itself, you slide the one blade on the inside, one on the outside and if at all possable, you want one smooth cut down each side, now if you have to do more then one cut per side, so be it but one is the ideal, so there should be four cuts like the one shown above, the outside’s are always longer then the inside, the inside cut typically is half to even a quarter in length to the outside.

Now you can take off the top tip off, on a good hoof, you will be rounding it off more then anything, typically one snip on the bottom to level it, and then one or two on the top to round it off.  however some of the hoof’s will have more narrow ends and will be tipped off instead of rounded.

So here is our finished foot, its been leveled, cleaned and tipped.. this is a naturally good looking hoof and it just needed some basic trim.. so next lets look at a sheep’s foot that is not naturally as good, and who’s is a little overgrown.

I figured this was the perfect foot to show the most two common issues you will see if you are doing regular care, on the left side, you have a overgrowth from the side and on the right side, a deeply narrow pointed top. Before you can clean out the hoof, you need to remove the overgrowth, you slide the one blade under and cut it off, then clean out and trim as on the normal foot above.. You can see the finished trim below, it looks a bit different from the one above, you can tell at a glance who needed more work and shaping.

Now just repeat on all four feet, and X amount of times till everyone is done, do your spring lambs just to give their feet a look over and mark their condition and conformation down in your farm book.

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