Annabelle

I’ve been thinking about my old ewe Annabelle a lot today. She was not our first sheep, but she was the first one that I claimed as “mine.” I was in college when Annabelle came to live with us. I woke up one morning to the angry and impatient sound of “BAAA! BAAA! BAAA!” Rolling out of bed, I went to investigate. I found my mom in the kitchen mixing up milk replacer for a bottle. On a blanket on the floor was a little white lamb only a few days old. She was hungry and was not shy about letting the whole house know it! Our neighbor had been at someone else’s farm and the old farmer had this new lamb who couldn’t walk. He was going to “knock it in the head” so my neighbor asked if she could have that baby. She brought her to my mom because we already had several sheep. It turned out the little one had white muscle disease, which is a lack of selenium, and after a few days on the bottle she was fine! Annabelle grew up thinking she was one of the dogs. All attempts to integrate her with the sheep were loudly rejected. “Who are these alien creatures? These are not my people! Let me out of here!” I believe part of the issue was that Annabelle was a Cheviot cross and all my sheep were Corridale crosses. They didn’t look like her!

Realizing we couldn’t have a grown house sheep and she was going to have to learn to be a real sheep, mom and I did the only sensible thing— we went to go visit my grandmother in Washington State and left my dad in charge of dishing out the tough love and making Annabelle be a real sheep. Honestly, I’m surprised that we didn’t come home to her sleeping in bed with him. (My dad is kind of a softy.) But he did it! Annabelle was living with the rest of the sheep when we came back! In true Annabelle fashion, though, she decided that she was clearly a better breed and therefore was Boss Ewe. And thus began the long reign of Queen Annabelle.

My mom loves to tell the story that, after her mare Missy passed on to the farm in heaven, she decided to open up Missy’s pasture to the sheep for grazing. They were not sure about that. They’re creatures of habit and that was not their pasture. There might be monsters in there. Annabelle and a couple of the older ladies were laying in the shade of the sweet gum tree on the hill, watching as Mom spent hours trying all her tricks to coax the rest of the sheep into that pasture. The younger ones were curious. A few went in. Nothing ate them up, so a few more went in. Success! Just as she got the last of them in, Annabelle, up on her hill, hollered, “It’s a trap!!!!” And all the sheep ran out of the horse pasture, back to their own, and never again set a hoof in there. The Queen had spoken.

She gave us beautiful sweet babies and had a wonderful sheepy life but eventually, in her older age, arthritis caught up with Annabelle. If a sheep lives long enough, they usually fall victim to this. It was harder for Annabelle to get outside and walk around. Eventually she was entirely incapacitated by it. It didn’t seem to make her uncomfortable, though, and she was always in good spirits. Still the boss! We moved her and a couple of the older sheep into their own stall (the Retirement Villa) where they could eat without having to push and shove with the younger sheep. Not wanting her to be stuck in there all the time, my dad made a sheep wheelchair for her. He cut the legs off of a plastic chair and attached it to a set of hand trucks. We would take it into her stall every morning and hoist her up, plop her butt in the chair, strap her in with her “seatbelt” (a padded saddle girth), and roll her out into the yard next to the barn! She and the other oldies would hang out and eat grass and I would go down every few hours and move her. She was a bit like a lawn ornament, but she was a happy lawn ornament. At night we’d put her on the golf cart and drive her back into the barn. Setting her down at her stall door, she could make her way to her favorite spot, with some help. I would get up in the middle of the night every night and check on her and help her move. (This is probably how I got the herniated disc in my back.)

When she first got arthritis we didn’t have a large animal vet in the area who treated sheep. Pretty much everything we know about sheep has been learned from books and talking to vet clinics up north who deal with sheep. Mom called one of these big clinics to ask what we could do to help her. The vet said, “Well, you’re gonna want to cull that ewe.” Mom asked if sheep could have Adequan (dog arthritis meds), and if so at what dosage? Also what dosage would you give for a glucosamine/ chondroitin mix? There was a long pause and he said, “You’re not gonna cull that ewe, are you?” Nope! We did everything we could to make her life happy. She outlived all her original buddies and quite a few younger sheep who came through her Retirement Villa needing special care.

Eventually, one year in early summer, we were faced with having to let go of her favorite buddy Thomas. (I’ll post about him later. He was quite a character! If Annabelle was Queen, he was King. He was my mom’s special boy, as Annabelle was my special girl. They are the sheep on the logo for our farm.) It was hot and only going to get hotter and I was starting to have a hard time keeping her comfortable, even on all her meds. It was one of the hardest days of my life. The worst thing I go through on this farm is having to let go of old friends who don’t feel bad, they just can’t get up and walk anymore. Arthritis is a bitch. We buried them both not in the sheep graveyard but in the pet graveyard with the dogs and cats. I think they would have liked that. They were both more dog than sheep, anyway. We’ve had other ewes over the years who took up the mantle of Boss Ewe, but no one ever held the authority Annabelle held over her flock. She was one of a kind! I imagine her on my farm in heaven, lying in the shade under the sweet gum tree on the hill, keeping all the young’uns in line.