Why Do We Wean Our Lambs?
Weaning time!
On Wednesday, we pulled our ram lambs to truck them to a different solar site. With some of them being nearly four months old, it was time.
In the past, we’ve experimented with weaning lambs earlier (necessary especially when Mom has health issues and is in poor body condition) and later (including playing around with a natural weaning method in which we allow the mother’s milk to dry up on its own).
While the first strategy is often done out of necessity rather than striving toward best practices (we’d prefer to keep them on Mom much longer, whenever possible), the latter strategy has also proved to be not-so-effective for us.
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A Helpful Example
Let’s break it down to something everyone understands: people.
In the United States, it’s estimated that about 75% of all women breastfeed for at least some period of time. Roughly half of all babies are breastfed at six months, and about 40% are still breastfed at one year. This is the average time of weaning for most human babies, who switch from breastmilk or formula to cow or goat milk at that point. It’s estimated that less than 12% of American children breastfeed for more than 24 months.
This is for a variety of reasons, but not necessarily for health. The World Health Organization recommends that human infants breastfeed a minimum of 12 months but ideally for 24 or more.
For the most part, human infants are weaned out of necessity (or societal norms) in our modern, industrialized society. Most mothers work, and those who don’t have many other responsibilities that make breastfeeding challenging, especially if the baby is already getting many of his or nutrients from solid food. Of course, there’s also the societal stigma of nursing a baby once it’s begun to be mobile.
Why Do We Wean Our Lambs?
There aren’t really health problems associated with humans nursing their babies too long, at least not for the vast majority of Americans who have ample calories at their disposal as well as ample calories to feed their developing babies via solid food. In other countries, where food access is more of a challenge, it is more common for women to nurse their children far longer.
For livestock, though, there are some very valid health reasons to consider earlier weaning rather than allowing them to follow a more natural timeline.
We found that, when following a natural weaning strategy for our lambs, it was much harder to keep weight on the mothers, especially if they were nursing twins. We predominantly raise our ewes on pasture and while we do supplement occasionally with grain, it’s not a staple.
If we were to heavily grain feed, this likely wouldn’t be as big of an issue, but it would be costlier and not necessarily beneficial for the ewe outside of increased weight gain. As we’ve discussed in other posts, ruminants are biologically designed to eat grasses and other fibrous plant materials.
So, we limit it whenever possible, using it as a treat and training tool (and nutritional aid in gestation and early lactation), but not as a dietary staple throughout the ewe’s entire lifespan.
You might say, “well, in the wild, animals nurse as long as they want.” And that’s true. But they also reach maturity later, and when you’re raising animals for meat, the goal is to raise animals that grow as quickly and vigorously as possible (while maintaining their overall health, of course).
We know it’s time to wean based on age, as well as the feeding habits of the lambs. In mid June, we notice them feeding less and less often, and getting less milk when they do. They spend more time grazing rather than chasing Mom around for a snack.
This indicates to us that it’s time to wean.
Weaning for Breeding Management
There are a lot of different ways you can do this, but we’ve found the easiest is to move the lambs to a separate location entirely. This mitigates some of the stress of the animals still being in close proximity to each other.
This may sound cruel - separating a mother from her baby - but keep in mind that many of our lambs are almost the size of their mothers at this point. Developmentally, they are no longer babies.
Which leads us to another reason why we naturally wean (particularly for the rams), and that has to do with breeding.
Recently, we made the decision to stop castrating our ram lambs (to turn them into wethers). Again, we had several reasons for doing this.
One was that we were concerned that the banding process was increasing stress and the risk of infection.
While we do vaccinate against most diseases that could be caused by banding with the CDT vaccine, for us it had become just another checklist item that was adding time to our daily chores and taking away from more important herd management tasks. We also had read some promising evidence that convinced us that by not banding, we would increase the size and overall vitality of our ram lambs.
We’ve seen excellent results with this; this year’s intact ram lambs are the largest and most vigorous we’ve ever had. Not only do they gain more weight, but they are also more aggressive feeders, meaning they put on weight more easily and quickly.
Avoiding “Tainted” Meat
However, as with anything, there’s a catch.
One is that if you wait too long to butcher an intact male animal, you run the risk of giving the meat an “off” flavor.
If you’ve ever heard of “boar taint” in pork, it’s the same general theory. Many people believe that it’s the testosterone in an animal that leads to this off flavor (sometimes described as gamey or musky), but it’s actually a separate hormone called 5-alpha-androstenone, which is a pheromone.
Some say you can avoid this entirely, no matter the age of the boar, by keeping it away from the fertile sows so the pheromone production is lower.
The theory is similar in sheep. To prevent any off flavor, we do two things: one, we make sure we butcher the rams long before they’re considered “mutton” (ideally, before they reach one year of age, though the official definition of mutton varies and can be as long as three years or older). This helps prevent any toughness.
The second thing we do is keep them away from the ewes. This varies by breed and the individual animal, but on average, a ram lamb can breed as early as four months old.
Not only would this increase unwanted flavors in the meat, but it also risks us getting ewe lambs pregnant when we don’t want them to be pregnant. While some producers do aim for early winter lambing so they can have meat for the Easter and other springtime holidays, that’s not something we do, and we’d prefer not to have newborn lambs when the temperatures are dropping in December.
The Caveat
By keeping the rams integrated in the flock, we would also run the risk of rams breeding their mothers.
Now, if that made you crinkle your nose a bit, I don’t blame you!
Keep in mind that animals are unlike humans in that some breeding of related animals is not necessarily a bad thing and not always totally avoidable. However, what we do want to avoid is animals breeding very closely related relatives, like their own parents. Inbreeding, as with other species, narrows the gene pool and increases the risk of offspring inheriting undesirable traits.
Funny enough, this is actually a practice that is done quite often in pedigree breeding, in which animals are being bred for registration and need to have very specific desirable traits. The irony is that in pedigree breeding, the process is referred to as line breeding, whereas the exact same process on a commercial farm is referred to as in-breeding. The devil is truly in the details!
Whatever you might call it, it’s something we try to avoid whenever possible, especially when it comes to ram lambs who are bound for fall slaughter. These are the ones we’ve already decided we don’t want to use as our regular breeders for one reason or another (they might have a propensity toward parasites, or foot problems, or are just slow-growing, for instance).
Final Thoughts
By separating out the rams from the rest of the flock, we not only give the mothers time to regain their health before they’re bred again in the fall, but we also make sure our rams are given the best opportunity to thrive.
Not to mention, with several solar sites to maintain this summer, these sheep have a lot of work to do! So off we send them to divide and conquer - and grow as healthy as possible in the meantime.
Want to learn more about raising sheep? Check out these featured articles!
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