Thanks for that post David. Poor Cecil, he probably couldn't have survived for much longer before being rescued.
I really appreciate and enjoy your happy ending posts and feel good stories xx
3BrNBBRz4UYdo+!~~60_7.JPG "chameleon54"){kind=avatar}
Our near city farm is located in a very hilly and wet region surrounded by lifestyle blocks and national parks. As the only " real " sheep farmer in the area I often get asked to help out when neighbours have sheep or other livestock problems. A few years back I had to shear a similar wooly wonder.. It had wandered out of the hilly scrub onto a neighbours property and had a minimum of 3 years wool, maybe four years. It took two of us to roll it over and drag it to the shearing plant and around 30 minutes to shear. I never weighed the fleece, but it would have been well over 20 kg. ( and very smelly ....
)
The sheep is living out its old age on the neighbours property and I go back every year to give it a trim. Its amazing that a sheep can escape flystrike and survive with that much wool on for several years.
I had a worrying experience myself a few years ago when around 40 of my sheep escaped into very rugged terain in a nearby 5000 ha. national park. Illegal roo shooters had come onto the property and left the gate into the park open. The sheep " went native " becoming very cagey and roaming over a 5 km. area, occasionally poping up on distant properties. After a number of weeks of riding through rough, rocky, dangerous terrain on a motor cycle, I eventually established they where regularly camping on a very high mountain peak where they could see for miles. I waited until a warm day when I thought they would be camping on the peak and walked the several km. to the camp site with my best kelpie sheep dog.
The sheep sensed us approaching and ran full pelt, crashing through the scrub, down the hill. Not knowing what to do, I sent the dog off after them, wondering if he would become lost and wether I would ever see him again. An hour later I found the dog at the base of the mountain. He had managed to round up all of the sheep and was keeping them corraled until I arrived. It then took several hours for the dog to follow commands and work them through the scrub, back to the paddock. By the time we all got there, sheep, man and dog where totally exhausted.
A dog can normally only be expected to work under intense pressure for perhaps 30 minutes, so to manage a number of hours of intense concentration was a truly heroic feat. That was definately one of the most amazing experiences I have had with working sheep dogs, only equeled by a very small border collie pup on another occasion many years ago............. But that is another story for another day.
