Bonding and Stockmanship

For the last year or so, we've been working with a PhD student at UC Davis. Kaleiah Schiller is interested in animal behavior - and specifically in maternal behavior in sheep. Studying a subset of our ewe flock, Kaleiah videotaped our interactions with ewes and lambs during our 2019 lambing season. She also observed ewe behavior during pre-lambing vaccinations, shearing, and weaning. Last weekend, she presented a poster with some of her preliminary findings at the 159th annual meeting of the California Wool Growers Association. Of particular note, she found that:

"This experiment demonstrates the importance of the human-animal bond in minimizing the anxiety and stress caused by human management and intervention."

Kaleiah testing a ewe's willingness to approach
an unfamiliar person.

This is a reasonably straightforward statement - but one with profound implications for sheep (and all livestock) production. While my experience with lambing ewes is limited to my own sheep and one season at McCormack Sheep and Grain in Rio Vista, my own observations confirm Kaleiah's conclusion.

Our sheep - all of them - see us every day. This is partly a function of scale - we have (at the moment) roughly 150 head of sheep. But this is also a function of our management system. We use livestock guardian dogs, which means we feed each dog (and see each group of sheep protected by a dog) everyday. We also rely on electro-net fencing rather than permanent fencing, which means we move sheep every 3-7 days. This may seem like a small point, but it also means that every 3-7 days, the sheep associate us with fresh forage - positive reinforcement.

This familiarity pays off at lambing time. Most of our ewes are not terribly stressed when we catch their lambs within the first 24 hours of their birth. Many of our ewes stay within 25 feet of us while we're "processing" their lambs. This is partly due to familiarity; it's also partly due to the fact that we've consistently selected ewes who are solid mothers. Regardless, our system seems to result in the "human-animal bond" that Kalieah has observed.

My experience at McCormack Sheep and Grain, in many ways, confirms this observation by demonstrating the opposite behavior. Admittedly, this is a much larger flock (1300 in the year I worked there). But these ewes were not as bonded with their shepherds (myself included) as my own sheep - they were extremely stressed when we caught their lambs. Indeed, some ewes would leave their lambs as soon as they saw a human - any human. By necessity, we had to bring most pairs into the barn to solidify the ewe-lamb bond. This required considerably more time than our pasture lambing system.

Emma marking a McCormack lamb in 2014.

Part of this difference, I'm sure, was the lack of selection pressure - McCormack's did not use maternal ability as a criteria for keeping ewes - and retaining ewe lambs. But part of this difference was also a result of a different management system. McCormack sheep graze large paddocks - and may only see a shepherd once a week (if that). This difference, I think, has profound implications for the economics of sheep production. We generally consider labor to be an overhead expense (that is, labor costs don't vary with the number of sheep we're managing). One shepherd ought to be able to care for 1000 ewes most days. But the sheep may be telling us something different. Sheep will bond with a shepherd (research suggests that sheep actually recognize people). There may be an upper limit (probably somewhere around 600-800 ewes) to this bonding process. I wonder if we'd have had better success putting one shepherd with each 600 ewes at McCormack's several months before lambing began - and keeping this shepherd with this group through lambing. Perhaps that's another experiment we ought to do!

We often talk about the bond between shepherd and dog, or cowboy and horse. We often fail to understand (at least in my opinion) the importance of the bond between shepherd and sheep (or cowboys and cows). I suppose this is largely a matter of trust - and positive feedback. But I also think it's an underappreciated component of stockmanship. Stress is reduced when we know each other. And lower stress means lower labor costs - and increased productivity. Maybe we need to intentionally spend time bonding with our livestock!