OPINION: This is what I did last Wednesday morning: I sat on an upturned bucket inside a sheep-milking shed, holding a ram lamb’s head and front legs while a vet called Adrian was slicing the lamb’s testicles off. I wasn’t looking. The ram lamb was my beloved pet, Reginald, the son of my beloved ewe, Elizabeth Jane. I suspected a conspiracy between Adrian and Miles the sheep farmer. I had nagged and nagged Miles into giving Reggie the op. Miles had threatened to sell him into servitude in China. There was no way he was going to China. I was determined to keep him.
The conspiracy I suspected was that Miles and Adrian had arranged in advance to provide a running commentary on how the op was proceeding. I had asked Miles to provide an additional bucket. I was feeling a bit sick. The additional bucket had somehow not materialised. Reggie had been given drugs. I hadn’t. Drugs made him woozy. Woozy-making drugs for me would have been good.
Before this traumatic event, I had been given an education that involved participation in the sheep-breeding business of “palpating”. It involves massaging a ram’s bollocks. We were checking for lesions, some of which can be caused by rams going for other rams. A ram will hump anything, including me. As I know. Carolyn, the former shepherdess, once told me: “Well, you are a girl.”
If anyone had told me before I came to Lush Places that six years hence, I would be sitting in a milking shed massaging rams’ bits, and supervising the chopping off of a ram’s bits, I’d have been incredulous. I remain incredulous.
I obviously, despite six years of being around sheep, and going around boasting of my knowledge of all things sheep, know nothing about sheep. I went into the milking shed to find a row of sheep in the milking pens. Their bums were facing out. “Hello, ladies,” I said. Miles said: “Look how ladylike they are.” What I had taken for udders were great, big knackers, the ones we were about to palpate.
Later, Miles’ wife, Janet, told me that in their early days of sheep milking, she decided to help out. The milking staff, alerted to this, smuggled a ram into the row. She attempted to attach the milking cups to the knackers, to the obvious annoyance of the kicking ram and the delight of the milking-shed staff. Funny, eh? Yep. Up there with those legendary pranks – probably now punishable by some law – of sending apprentices to buy left-handed hammers or tartan paint.
Six years in the country. I thought I would, in addition to being able to distinguish between udders and knackers, somehow, miraculously, morph into a tough country gal, fit and stringy, capable of flinging an 80kg sheep on its back to have its hooves clipped, say.
Instead, I can barely lift a 20kg sack of sheep nuts into its plastic tub. I certainly can’t tip my 80kg ewes over to have their pedicures. I am a weakling, a wretched candidate for country living. I can’t even drive.
My country girl mates are tough as. Pru farms 280ha in addition to, at last count, at least a dozen rescue donkeys and any number of retired farm dogs and assorted wild cats. She is capable of pushing a recalcitrant 200kg donkey into a horse float.
Janet shoots bullets and arrows. City girl Charlotte, who came down from Auckland to do a season in the sheep-milking shed, hooned about town in Pru’s army-green ute, named The Beast, with her pet lamb, Jimmy, in the passenger seat. She wore cut-off dungarees, woman-handled stroppy sheep and left town looking like a finely toned athlete.
Annoyingly, they all also scrub up well. As evidenced in the above pic of Pru – dressed by Charlotte – in her finery, showing off, and winning the red ribbon, with Portia, at the last Wairarapa donkey show before Covid killed off our A&P show.
Still, they haven’t held a ram lamb while his nuts were being cut off. Perhaps I am very gradually becoming a tough country gal. Give me another six years.
