I want to learn about pet sheep?

[Newbee]

Just curiously looking into farm animals. I have chickens and enjoy them... Not planning on any sheep just yet...
Anyway, I know nothing... what are sheep like as pets? How do you care for them? Can you keep just two or three? And how big does a pen need to be (for only a few)?
I probably sound so stupid ._.

 

[freemotion]

No reason not to keep just a couple, and you could give a great home to a couple of castrated males who would otherwise be dinner. My first suggestion is to go to the library, or TSC if you have one nearby, and get a couple of books on sheep. Also check with sheep owners near you and find out if there is someone who will come and sheer them for a fee....this is necessary even for pet sheep.

 

[patandchickens]

I dunno, my own sheep experience is not *much* more than yours , but the two that I got a week and a half ago seem rather stressed by being the only two sheep in the world. In particular I can't seem to persuade them to go out on grass and STAY there; they will eat for a little while, but if I lock them out there, they huddle in a corner all flattened to the ground like they're trying desperately not to be noticed, and breathe very rapidly.

I get the impression they would be much happier with more sheepy companions, and indeed I have read that the minimum number of sheep to exhibit semi-normal flock type behaviors is five or so. (I have a few more sheep coming this weekend but they will probably be adjacent-but-separate, so we will see what happens).

I truly have no idea how generally true this is, or whether my two dairy sheep will at some point get more used to their relative loneliness, or how well it might substitute to have other animals in the same pen/paddock (although there are some nutritional difficulties when mixing other animals with sheep). I am just tossing this out there.

Big farming standards generally call for providing something like 10-15 sq ft per sheep when they are raised in confinement (e.g. if you had them in a pen and hayed them all year). Normally though they are outdoor grazing animals; it is generally said that an acre of really good pasture can support 3-4 ewes and their lambs, during the growing season (of course less-good pasture will support fewer)

I would say that, as pets, they seem a lot more like chickens than they do like (say) goats or horses. But they do have very cute sniffy little noses

JM(very limited)E,

Pat

 

[jessica117]

We were successful with 4 (3 ewes and a wether, we started out with just 2 ewes and they were fine together) and they were perfectly happy on about an acre. If you get them as lambs (that have been handled since birth) and handle them every day they will grow into friendly petable sheep. The only time they will want less to do with you is if they think you are trying to catch one of them. I had a small "containment" area (about 10' x 10' with a door) that I would coax all of them into it with a handfull of whole kernel corn and catch them one by one for shearing, hoof trimming and such.

Some breeds, just like chickens, are more friendly than others. This is where a sheep book will come in handy. We had shetlands and tunis. The tunis were more friendly but I think it was more the way they were raised. The tunis we had from lambs up, the shetlands we kind of inherited at 4 years or so and they weren't handled as much before we got them but I still wouldn't consider them unfriendly by and stretch of the imagination.

Here is a pic of my son when he was 3 to give you an idea of how docile sheep can be. I never worried about my kids out in the pasture with the sheep.

Hope this helps