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Ewes and Rams and My Dirty Hands

I am not an animal person. Not that I mean any harm to animals or anything; I just don't have much direct experience with animals (other than cats). I didn't have any pets growing up, other than some short-lived fish, and I've always had a phobia of dogs. So I tend to generally avoid animals and have never been involved in the messy details of what it's like to care for one.

This all changed a few days ago.

On our Ladybug roadtrip, Matt and Farley and I met Bob and Marilyn Masefield, some friendly Kiwi sheep and cow farmers, who invited us to stay a night in a cottage on their farm. (I told that story here.) When we were leaving, they heartily encouraged us to return another time. They made us feel so welcome that I actually took them up on their offer when Steve and I made our quick tour of the South Island.

We planned to stay two nights so that we could spend the intervening day helping out on the farm, doing some kind of work to repay their hospitality. Steve and I arrived mid-afternoon on the first day, and knocked on their door to let them know we had arrived. Marilyn greeted us warmly, and we gave her a bottle of wine and a small bottle of Jack Daniels as a hospitality gift. She invited us up for dinner later, and sent us down to the cottage to settle in.

Further down the gravel driveway, we arrived at the cottage, a small building, but bigger than you might imagine when you hear the word "cottage." It has a small yard, completely fenced in by a wooden, waist-high fence, which contained maybe 25 sheep.


Our arrival interrupted their blissful grass-chewing, and they edged away from us nervously. Inside the door is a combination kitchen and sitting room, with more chairs than comfortably fit. There is a sink, a new stove/oven, a fridge, and freezer surrounding the kitchen table. Through a door is the first of three bedrooms, each with two beds. The cottage has enough capacity to host a small girl scout troop (or, more appropriately, 4H club). It is dirty around the edges, with old, worn-out furniture, but it is much preferable to camping.


The view from inside the cottage

The bathroom is outside the front door in a little section of its own. Inside there is a toilet, sink, and old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub.

We lugged in our bags, then took a walk to the beach through several fields and through a few gates. We climbed over a final fence to reach the beach.

Sidenote: Something to realize is that in New Zealand, most fences are not for the benefit of people, but animals. So you'll often come across a fence with steps built on either side for the ease of people wishing to climb over. It was an adjustment for American me who is used to fences being used to keep neighbours out. Here, when you climb over a fence, you don't have to feel like you're doing something sneaky.

The beach, Goughs Bay, is one of many bays on the Banks Peninsula. It is maybe a kilometer wide and has no public access. We had it to ourselves and walked up and down its length, enjoying the view, before returning to the cottage.

After unpacking a bit and settling in, we went up to the main house for dinner. We enjoyed a few before-dinner drinks with Marilyn, Bob, and their 16-year-old daughter, Pip, who was home for vacation from boarding school. Steve and I peppered Bob with questions about sheep. To both of us, sheep were a quaint and interesting feature of the New Zealand landscape which we hardly knew anything about. They were a novelty. Bob and his family, on the other hand, live with sheep and know all there is to know about them, but don't consider that anything special.

Eventually, we moved into the dining room and enjoyed a delicious steak dinner (yes, from one of their cows). We didn't stay around long after dinner for fear of keeping them awake longer than they wanted, and returned to the cottage for a cozy night's sleep.

The next morning we woke up and had breakfast at a leisurely pace. Eventually (about 9:30am), we wandered down to the woolshed to find Bob.

The woolshed is the centre of the action on the farm. Inside, animals are sheared and temporarily stored. Outside is a maze of paddocks delineated by wooden fences and connected by gates, through which sheep are herded and sorted throughout the day for any number of reasons.

(I suppose I should mention at some point that, yes, we were on a farm and it smelled like it. And "it" was also all over the ground and ended up caked on our shoes.)

Bob does his farmwork surrounded by his sheepdogs - five of them. I approached the woolshed with my usual caution around unleashed dogs. I knew, however, that these were working dogs more than pets. They had some time during the day to lay around, but when Bob called or whistled ("Guide, Dan!" "Behind, Boss!") they ran to do their job. They live in a kennel, not the house. So I thought they would probably be better behaved around me than your average house dog.

That was kind of true, but these dogs like attention as much as any other and came up to you looking for it. Steve was happy to oblige, and eventually the dogs figured out I wasn't interested.

We hung around on the farm all day (more specifics later), and something quite amazing happened - I got used to the dogs' presence. At first I avoided them as usual, trying to stay on the other side of the fence, etc. But eventually, I stopped worrying about it and they ran around my legs as much as anyone's. It got to the point where I wasn't even bothered when they ran in my direction - the most frightening thing for a dog-phobic person. Steve, who has observed two years of my persistent phobia, was astounded late in the afternoon when I bounded over a fence into a crowd of sheepdogs without a second thought.



I don't think I'm cured of my phobia now, but it was a very enlightening experience. I think it happened because I grew to trust that these particular dogs weren't going to jump up on me and hurt me. I'm still wary of strange dogs, but I think I've gained the ability to adjust to dogs I know.

If my doggy experiences weren't enough already, there were plenty more animal-related breakthroughs to come that day.

After Bob showed us around the woolshed area and answered more of our questions, it was time for a potential buyer to arrive. The main focus of Bob and Marilyn's farm is selling studs (rams). We were reaching the end of selling season, and Bob was dreading yet another chatty customer. He asked us to hang around so he wouldn't bear the brunt alone. We watched as, interspersed among much useless chatter, the customer checked out the available rams and inspected their statistics. He ended up buying two - instead of the one he came for. Steve and I took undeserved credit for the extra sale.

We all walked up to the house for tea, where Bob, Marilyn, Steve, and I had tea and sat listening to this guy talk for another forty-five minutes or so. When he began to repeat himself, Bob grabbed the newspaper, looked up the tide charts, and announced that if Steve and I wanted to go gather some paua (abalone - a large shellfish) as we had been planning, he needed to take us down to the beach right away because we'd missed low tide.

Of course we had not actually been planning this, but it was a good excuse, so we left the talker to Marilyn and headed to the beach at the end of the farm. We rode on a four-wheeled Honda motorbike that Bob and his family use to get around the farm. Once on the beach, we walked to a section that had large rocks instead of sand. Bob reached between the rocks and pulled out a paua to demonstrate how it was done. "You have to be fast, or they'll bloody clamp on," he advised, tossing his first catch into a bucket.



We spent the next fifteen minutes or so miserably failing to be fast enough, while Bob plucked eight or nine pauas from their hiding places. It was a bit of a stretch for me to reach into the water and grab a big shell, trying to get to the slimy creature underneath. But I gave it my best, and did have one semi-triumph: grabbing a paua who was attached to a small rock, which I then twisted off.

Bob drove us back to the cottage with our plunder and came inside to prepare them so we could watch. He pulled them out of their shell (which, being abalone, is very pretty and blue-green inside), then cut off the mouth, keeping only the large muscle. He washed off those, then left for the house to have lunch.

We ate lunch and met up again a bit later. Bob was hard at work inspecting ewes' feet for foot rot, so he suggested that Pip take Steve and I for a horse ride. I haven't done any horseback riding beyond perhaps a pony ride or two as a kid, and I've always been a little leary of horses. It doesn't go to the level of fear I have of dogs; it's just that horses are bigger than I am, and so I'm wary.


But the horse riding was a great success! I rode Versary, a fairly old horse who was safe and responsive. To my surprise, guiding the horse was easy - it responded to my tugs on the reins and the only struggle I occasionally had was getting it to go faster. Pip rode a younger horse who was a bit harder to control while Steve and I switched off on Versary. (Whoever wasn't on horseback at the time rode on the motorbike.)


Me, herding sheep on horseback

I had a great time trotting all over the farm and felt like quite a cowgirl. We rode around aimelessly for a while, then helped Pip herd some sheep from horseback.

It was about 3 or 4 in the afternoon when we returned the horses to their stable and went back to the woolshed. By that time, Bob had been hard at work tipping sheep for a few hours. Let me explain "tipping sheep."

Sheep are as a rule afraid of people and don't like you to get near them. So, if you want to do something like shear them or inspect their feet, first you must herd them into a small shed where you can corner them one at a time, then tip them: a feat that involves grabbing the head by the chin, twisting the sheep so its weight is leaning against your leg, moving your leg (making the sheep fall over), and wrestling the sheep into a kind of sitting position with its stomach exposed.

Strangely enough, once sheep are put in that position, they almost always stop struggling and sit, legs splayed, and allow you to do your worst. Actually getting them tipped is another story. It's a hard struggle for each sheep, and sometimes they can wriggle free halfway through and you have to start over.

Bob looked haggard and sore after having tipped almost 200 ewes, but had not lost his good humour. He declared that we should each give tipping a try. I was very hesitant, thinking mostly of the accumulated excretia and other dirt covering the animals, so Steve valiantly went first. It took him a while to exert his will upon the sheep, and I took advantage of the time to snap some pictures.



Finally, Steve triumphed and it was my turn. I asked how much my quarry weighed and found out that it did, indeed, weigh more than me. I gingerly put my hand under the sheep's jaw. Bob reached over and corrected my grip, then I began to pull. All thoughts of dirt and grime left me as I concentrated fully on grappling with the sheep. I braced my left leg against its rear hip as I twisted its head. I successfully removed my leg and dropped the sheep, but it almost got away. I strained against the sheep, holding one forelimb in each hand, and wrested it onto its backside.



I posed for a picture, then handed control of the sheep over to Bob, who inspected its feet. I have no idea what it would be like to do that 200 times in one day - once was hard enough.

After the last few sheep, it was time for another task: shearing an enormous ram. The ram was a Romney breed, which means its wool grows very fast. We found out that tipping ewes is not very hard compared to tipping a ram weighing about 140 kilograms (well over twice my weight). Fortunately for us, Bob didn't suggest we try. He and Pip managed after a struggle to get the ram on its back.

The electric shears are quite loud, and I was surprised that the noise (and the contact) didn't seem to bother the ram. It looked very relaxed even as Bob sheared its genitals. After most of the shearing was done, Steve and I got to give it a go.



When we finished, we left the wool on the floor for another time and spent twenty minutes or so herding sheep from one paddock to another. If you were watching from a distance, it wouldn't make any sense, but we were doing things like sorting the two breeds (Romney and Dorset Down), sending the sheep through a corral containing an antibiotic footwash, and separating rams from ewes.


Finally, it was almost dinnertime and Steve and I assumed Bob would be calling it a day soon. We excused ourselves and headed to the cottage for dinner - a meal which included the paua we had gathered earlier. Marilyn had prepared it in two different ways for us to try: chopped up and put in a pancake kind of patty, and sliced and marinated. I'm not big on shellfish, but for the last time that day I willed myself to step outside my boundaries and tried both kinds. The pancake ones were actually pretty good. The marinated ones were...interesting.

As we cooked and ate, we could see Bob cruising around the farm on his motorbike, still hard at work. He spent another two hours or so doing miscellaneous herding, making a twelve-hour day. Steve and I were so exhausted from the tiny fraction of his work that we had done that we fell into bed by nine o' clock.

The next morning, we awoke, packed, and drove to the Masefields' house to say thank you and goodbye. Bob was out on the farm, so we gave Marilyn and Pip our best wishes, and drove away enjoying the view down into Goughs Bay.


Goughs Bay


The day on the farm was a day that subtly changed me. I am proud of myself for reaching beyond my usual boundaries and because of that, getting the chance to experience things that I otherwise wouldn't have.

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