Babies Need a Mother’s Love

Springtime on the farm means baby animal season. Peeping chicks are due to arrive at the Post Office this week (along with the requisite early-morning phone call for us to come pick them up), and life has been busy in the barn with lambing.

Our flock has grown big enough now that we have split the ewes (momma sheep) into two breeding groups—one that lambs in the fall, and one that lambs in the spring. This way, we can give each cohort of moms and babies the time and attention they need. In the barn, we run cameras to watch the expectant mothers day and night, so we can be there to assist with the birth. There have been lots of triplets this spring, which can easily create complications during delivery, especially if there is a mal-presentation (baby is trying to come out backwards, upside down, or tangled with its siblings). Sometimes a ewe needs little help, while other times serious intervention is absolutely necessary to save the lives at stake.

Newborn lambs are terribly helpless and sometimes quite weak. New moms can be confused by what’s happening to their bodies and run away from the tiny lambs, clueless about their new role. Nurturing the lamb and the ewe through the process of bonding and gaining strength takes considerable time and effort (Kara has more than once fallen asleep in the small jug pen with a ewe and lamb after sleepless hours of tending), but the beauty, stability, and health of the family unit when all goes well and the newborns are flourishing is more than worth it.

Not all farms have time or desire for this nurturing. I’ll never forget visiting a large-scale, commercial dairy sheep farm in New England several years ago. There, the ewes were numbers, not names, and lambs were simply what had to happen in order to get milk. The whole process was not unlike what happens in many commercial cow dairies as well. The lambs had been pulled from their mothers right away (so they could be milked) and the little ones had been stuffed into a hoop house shelter for bottle feeding. This was not the kind of bottle feeding by hand with a person, either—rather there were buckets with nipples on the bottom for the lambs to help themselves, if they can.

These lambs were depressed, lethargic, and not thriving. It was heartbreaking! As experienced shepherds, we knew by looking at these poor animals which ones would be dead by morning. That day, we vowed that our own dairy sheep operation would not be run this way.

Baby mammals need their mothers. The bond is crucial in so many ways. The beneficial bacteria they gain from their mother’s physical presence is crucial to building a healthy gut and immune system, the social connection is critical to emotional stability and learning, and feeling loved (as we all know as fellow mammals) is pivotal to thriving. Our lambs live with their mothers full-time for six weeks before we start a split-day milking program until weaning. This yields significantly less milk for us, but the rewards show in our flock health and lamb survival rates.

And yet, sometimes you still end up with a bottle baby. This can especially be true when there are triplets. The ewe can often feed only two, and she will reject one in favor of the others. This is often a smaller one and a girl (boy lambs are much more needy and often catch the mother’s attention). When this happens, we work diligently to graft the unwanted lamb onto a new mom who has only birthed one or who faced pregnancy complications and had a stillborn. Timing is absolutely critical in order to fool the new mother that this is her real baby. Having a loving mother need not be the birth mother in order to achieve a meaningful and successful bond.

There are times, however, when this magical timing process doesn’t work out. An unwanted lamb goes without an adoptive ewe and ends up in the house on a bottle. There is too long of a gap between when she was born and the next delivery, and sometimes the lamb will be too heartbroken to accept a new mother. This was the case with Honey, who grew up in the farmhouse kitchen in a stock tank before returning to the barn at weaning.

It’s not that there wasn’t love in their lives—dogs to give them kisses, Kara to feed them night and day—but it wasn’t the love of a mother sheep. Honey has had babies of her own twice now, and she refuses to be a mother. She has no interest in her offspring and wants to bash them to death after delivery. We have to scoop them away and adopt them with other ewes to save them from torment or destruction. Honey missed important social milestones by not having a mother, and she is not able to regain those skills, even with the strong instincts most animals carry around mothering.

So, here’s to a celebration of meaningful motherhood, both for people and for animals! As we approach Mother’s Day, think on how we all can foster the nurturing aspects of what it means to mother those we love, including the animals in our care. See you down on the farm sometime.