Anyone who has ever met me knows I’m an animal lover. In fact, I can recall my 8th grade English teacher telling the class that I was going to grow up to have a career with animals. I’ve pretty much always had a houseful of pets ranging from hamsters to hedgehogs to mini pigs.
So moving onto a farm and expanding my “zoo” is no big surprise to anyone.
As soon as we started planning our move I joined a few chicken groups on Facebook. I started doing research on chicken care (I highly recommend Lisa Steele’s book “Farm Fresh Eggs”) and pretty soon I had one order of chickens placed…and then two…for 15 chickens and 5 guinea hens, 2-3 of which are heading to my friend’s house after they are fully feathered.
No biggie, right?
But then Christine started talking about how we need ducks to protect the blackberry bushes, something the old owner had suggested to us, so I had to place another order for some ducks. And then a week later I felt like four ducks were probably not enough (apparently the old owner kept some in the blackberry patch with an enclosed coop attached and then another group of ducks in the greenhouse area—wait, what do you call a group of ducks anyway? Hmm..). So I placed a fourth order for two types of ducks that are supposedly endangered but not hard to find online, the Ancona and Cayuga, and the company I ordered with charged a $20 fee for small orders that I really just didn’t want to pay so I somehow ended up with 11 more chickens.
How does that even happen? What did I do??
But luckily we have so many coops and land that it won’t be an issue, and I’m trying to convince myself I’ll need to give away all of the ones that turn out to be roosters anyway, so I won’t ACTUALLY have an insane amount of birds wandering all over the yard (many chickens can be sexed at a day old but some breeds cannot, and people make mistakes so we do expect a few roosters). 
Now I wish I could say I’m a practical person, but I may already be failing at this homesteading stuff because I do fall for cute animals that are pretty much useless. If you think I got the best egg layers out there after convincing Christine I could start an egg business, you are actually incorrect, because 9 of the 26 chickens are Silkies and 5 are Polish and cute they are, but good egg layers they are not. So over half of the chickens? Not that useful. I got 4 Barred Plymouth Rocks and those are good egg layers, so I feel like that makes up for all the cutesie chickens that don’t do much else. And then I’m kind of a sucker for pretty eggs too so I got 5 Easter Eggers and a Blue Copper Maran so that I can have blue and pink and even dark chocolate colored eggs. Some other decent layers in the mix as well, but this is a good intro to how I do things. I like cute things. I don’t always think things through too well.
Kind of like how we ended up with two mini pigs living in our house in the midst of a winter so cold that February averaged 12 degrees. The pigs literally could not go outside. All. Winter. Or the way we ended up with two horses and we live in a major city.
So you’d think I’d learn my lesson and be a little more careful but as Michael Curtiz said, “The only things you regret are the things you didn’t do.” I wonder if he’d actually regret saying that if he met me.
Hmm…
If you’re in any chicken groups you know how often chickens get killed by predators. Free range chickens are especially in danger, but how could I cage up my sweet chickens knowing they’d be happier running about and eating bugs in the yard?
So of course I needed to get a LGD—that’s livestock guardian dog for those city folk reading this.
These dogs are specific breeds, mostly from Turkey and Poland, that have been used for a great long while specifically to guard livestock. And by the way, some people do use donkeys and llamas for protection, but I’ve heard of llamas getting killed by predators, and is a donkey really going to prevent a hawk from snatching up one of my beloved chickens? I don’t know.
I love large dogs and I was happy to jump at the chance for some extra protection not just for our animals but for our family as well. My farmer friend has two Anatolians and I love them to pieces in spite of the fact that they aren’t the cuddly happy go lucky dogs that I usually am drawn to. LGDs are usually pretty aloof to strangers but very watchful over their family of both two and four leggers. I don’t hear much good about Great Pyrenees; I am thinking that many of them have been overbred and it may be hard to find a useful one these days. What I really wanted was a Polish Tatra but they are a very rare breed here in the states and even I couldn’t justify the $1,500 price tag.
In the end we are the proud owners of an Anatolian Kangal. She’s been raised on a farm with chickens, goats, and sheep and has never spent a day away from her animals.
Well, after that purchase I started looking at the LGD groups (seriously I need to learn not to join groups!) and I saw that people were recommending that everyone have sheep or goats for their LGDs because it’s good to keep them busy.
Oh no!, I had to wonder, would my LGD be BORED?
Well, I did love my Suffolk sheep back in my FFA days. Goats? Not my cup of tea. I get into enough trouble…I don’t need naughty critters causing more of it. So sheep made sense!
Sheep are big and cute. And well, cows are not an option for us, mostly because they terrify me, but sheep can be milked!
Awesome, sheep it is. So I set off to find dairy sheep in Texas.
Dairy sheep in Texas are harder to find than a unicorn pooping rainbows.
Apparently they don’t like the hot weather. And some sheep also apparently die really easily, like for NO reason. Just…dead…
Perfect, Leah. Why can’t you just like cows?
So then I decided that hey, I don’t drink a lot of milk, surely a regular non-dairy sheep could make a decent amount of milk. I mean, the creatures often have 4 babies at a time. If they have milk enough for their babies they can provide a gallon every two weeks for my consumption.
So I found a few cool breeds, mostly haired because my standard poodle’s haircuts were enough of a pain in the butt, no need to make things harder for me with wool. I emailed the breeders.
And boy did they laugh at me.
“You want to do what with sheep?”
“You ever met a sheep? They’re skittish creatures at best.”
“You’ve got the wrong animal…what you want is a GOAT.”
Well that was disheartening.
I only got two responses that were positive, but the Katahdin breeder promptly dropped off after offering me a few sheep for a reasonable price, so it was just the St. Croix breeder after that. He had some sheep that were his wife’s pets and were tame so he thought they *might* come around to being milked…maybe. He had three of those and which did I want?
I told him to give me the two tamest and he wrote back that he’d prefer to just sell me all three for the price of two so they could stay together. I won’t say no to that.
And that’s how we ended up with three ewes.
P.S. The goats you can blame on Christine.