As much as we love our new babies, we also want to recognize how important all of our animals are to us at the farm, especially the animals who have been around for many years helping our clients. Today I’m thinking about one of our oldest sheep, named Dot.

She is a small black Romney sheep around seven years old, who had a daughter named “Sunny” four years ago in a rainstorm.

After the sheep shearing this past March, when Dot was no longer covered in fluffy wool, we could tell that she had lost an incredible amount of weight, so you could see her ribs and protruding hip bones. We also noticed that she kept a distance in her pen from the other sheep, and stayed away from the feeders during mealtimes. When she did eat, she seemed to have trouble chewing and swallowing her hay. She also had decreased mobility while moving around the pen. 

Given the impending snow and freezing temperatures of last week, we decided to move Dot into the barn where we could create a makeshift pen. “Dot’s Palace” would be a place where she could stay warm and have plenty of hay and mashed-up grain to eat. Dot seemed to really enjoy her new pen, until people left her alone in it, and then she began making her low “baa-ing” noise and tried to break out of the pen. 

We thought she could use company while recuperating for the week, so we took her to the downstairs floor of the barn that has been functioning as our “maternity ward”. “Dot’s Palace” then became a pen she could roam around in with overhead heat lamps, a huge nest of straw, and curious twin baby goats who had never seen a sheep before.

Dot is continuing to put on weight and we are able to manage her physical symptoms with support from our vet. She continues to live in her palace, where she can be found sometimes wearing a jacket made by one of our clinicians, or sometimes surrounded by the twins who have adopted her as their unwilling grandma. If you enter the pen, it is a sure thing that she will slowly approach you “baa”ing for a leashed walk, so she can do her most favorite thing of grazing on the new spring grass.