Sometimes.....

When we had Bertie I used to have to set my alarm clock. Not to get us up, but he learned that I would refuse to get out of bed before the alarm went off. Before we started that system he would wake up 5 minutes earlier each day, and if I didn't get up he would leap up on the bed and start applying dog-CPR, jumping up and down on my chest with his paws.

Nowadays our dogs are less opinionated. I don't set the alarm. There is some agitation if I am not getting out of bed by 6am, but if I say "Go back to bed!" they will.

For a little while. Easier to get up.

Its not for anything important. That is, important to me. The first walk of the day is incredibly important to the dogs! Everything is exciting, from the moment I choose which direction we will be walking.

But today something unusual did happen. We had done a loop and were heading home when I noticed a single sheep stretched out, not moving. I hadn't noticed any sheep looking unwell in the last few days, everyone seemed to be fat and healthy. What could have happened?

What happened was....a smallish sheep, 9 months old, had crawled inside a roll of deer mesh. That is, a two metre high ringlock-wire roll. It was laying on its side. I won't call it a junk pile, everything in it is useful, but out in the main paddock was stash things like rolls of fencing wire, star-picket bundles, posts, timber. The sheep mooch around there once a day. Not sure why, there's no grass, nothing much of interest for them. There is a mound of road gravel they can sit on that is the high spot, and a few heavy things they can scratch on. Maybe that's what happened...the sheep was trying to scratch herself on the roll of wire.

After crawling inside the roll the sheep must have got tangled, and tried to pull herself out. But in doing so she had dragged the core of the wire with her. Wrapped in this awful blanket she had crawled some 20 metres, pulling a long corkscrew of mesh after her and tightening the wire around her. By the time I found her she was tightly trussed and couldn't move. She was exhausted and barely reacted to me. The dogs came up close for a sniff and she didn't react to them either. Bad sign.

No skin broken but her back leg was tightly circled by a criss-cross tangle of wire. It took me a few minutes to get her loose. She just lay there and I was expecting her to die of shock and exhaustion as I looked at her, but at least it made the untangling process simpler. if she had been kicking and struggling I would have had to go home and get some wire cutters.

Still early, so not too hot, but I picked her up and carried her into a shady spot, then took the dogs back home. I loaded up a drench gun with my home-brew sheep booster....water, molasses and a crushed vitamin tablet, and walked back. She was up and about, looking alert, but hobbling badly. I expect at the least her leg will be very painfully bruised for awhile.

Hopefully the circulation wasn't cut off and she can recover. I expect I will know in the next day or two.