Choice gleanings from 45-plus years of Unregistered Bull.

Maybe it won’t do any good to mention it in print, but since this country is supposed to have a free press, let’s talk about it anyway:

Death losses in Texas lambs after they’re shipped north.

We’ve heard complaints in varying volume about this for a good many years. In fact, ever since we discovered there was something else to the sheep business besides feeding ‘em all winter, shearing ‘em in the spring, doctoring ‘em for screwworms all summer, and gladly getting rid of as many of ‘em as possible in the fall.

Once upon a time it was soremouth. Texas Experiment Station vaccine got that whipped; after northern buyers learned to use it, soremouth was no longer a problem. Then there were stomach worms — but drenching took care of that, at least where it was done properly. Same way with overeating and several other interesting ways in which sheep seem to enjoy killing themselves.

This year, though, there seems to be a particularly loud holler from foreign states into which Texas lambs have been exported. Time after time, in traveling here and yon, we’ve been accosted by shippers who protested that they or their order customers had taken a financial whipping through death losses among Texas lambs. As if we had anything to do with it.

We inquired around, though, and got a variety of answers, including:

Northern Feeder: "Why, I haven’t had any trouble. I bought my lambs from the same territory as I have for 15 years and they’re doing fine."

Order Buyer No. 1: "Yeah, it’s been pretty bad. I shipped a man a bunch of lambs and he turned them out on green fields and they died off in bunches. Of course, they were awful light and weak when they left here."

Order Buyer No. 2: "No, I haven’t had any trouble with my customers. In fact, after shipping lambs as fast as I could since July, I’ve only had complaints of a dozen or so dying."

Expert Diagnostician of Sheep Diseases: "Trouble is, a lot of people buy drouthy, underweight lambs to save a dollar. They turn these lambs, which never had anything green to eat before in their lives, right out on rich alfalfa or something, and the pore little things just can’t take such rich feed all at once."

So it begins to look as though some buyers of Texas lambs have trouble and some don’t, depending on what kind of lambs they buy and how they handle them. But the people who have trouble talk the loudest, and that’s not good for the Texas sheep business. Bad news travels fast; a few isolated cases of losses among Texas lambs can create a widespread impression that all Texas lambs are bad bargains.

Several of the biggest lamb feeders in the Corn Belt have handled nothing but Texas lambs for 20 years or longer.

Numerous Corn Belt and West Coast experiments have shown Texas lambs to be at least as good as lambs from any other section.

Evidently it behooves Texans as well as sheep feeders from other states to seek the real truth behind reports of Texas lamb losses. From here, it looks as though it’s a matter of acquainting outside buyers with some facts about Texas lambs, such as:

It’s important for the northern feeder to know the condition of the lambs he’s getting — or to have a reliable order buyer who will see that the lambs are the right kind and properly prepared for shipment before they ever leave Texas. It’s important to see that lambs are handled right on the road — not starved to death on some railroad siding.

Texas lambs differ from ranch to ranch and from year to year. This year, a lot of lambs were so debilitated by drouth that they were in no shape to be shipped long distances at all. But many such lambs were loaded just the same, because they looked cheap. Experienced order buyers, anxious to take good care of good customers, wouldn’t have touched some of these lambs at any price.

Finally, recipients of the lambs up north failed to handle the lambs right after they got them. Maybe the lamb feeders didn’t realize what a drouth Texas was having, or the effect of the drouth on the constitution of the lambs; or maybe the feeder simply didn’t know how to handle sheep in the first place. In any case, lamb feeders need to know, or be advised, how to avoid death losses.

Of course, there’s no way to keep sheep from dying once in a while. They’ll do it before you know what’s happening. A lamb will come into this world on a bare patch of ground, get along amazingly well without anything to eat except scattered patches of dry grass roots. Then, when moved from his home pasture, the critter will stand right over a strange water trough and die of thirst unless somebody comes along and forces him to drink that first swallow.

But this applies to lambs everywhere. Not just Texas lambs. — (S.F. 10/04/56)