Does your sheep race meet these key requirements?

An effective sheep race can lessen the workload on sheep farms, reducing the labour input associated with many routine tasks. But is your race fit for purpose or do you often find yourself struggling to get ewes to enter?

As part of last week’s Teagasc National Lowland Sheep Conference, Director of Livestockwise Ltd., Miriam Parker detailed the principles of ‘Low Stress Handling for Shepherd and Sheep’. Her presentation offered farmers food for thought on how to improve the efficiency of their handling systems.

To promote low stress handling of sheep, Miriam Parker, pictured below, explained that positive sheep behaviours, such as the flight zone, point of balance and loose bunching, should be prioritised when moving sheep.  

“We can use the point of balance to get the animals to move forwards and backwards, the flight zone to move them away again and the loose bunching to go forward. We really don’t want animals turning to face you or split – certainly not through a handling system. Each time that they do that, you are losing seconds,” she explained.

More information on the behaviours influencing livestock movement is available here.

Essential elements

Although noting that sheep handling unit design can vary from farm to farm and country to country, Miriam Parker did highlight a number of essential elements to improve the effectiveness of your sheep race, asking the farmers in attendance: “If your sheep handling is not working, why is it not working?”

Firstly, she noted the importance of vision and having a clear exit in the sheep’s sightline. This is essential in terms of race positioning, as “a race way that goes up against a wall will never pull sheep through”. Additionally, the race should be constructed in such a way that it prevents the animals from being distracted by movement, whether from the shepherd or dog, further along the race.

“Anywhere you have a lot of distractions or a lot of people working, block it out. You should not see movement at sheep level.”

Another area to assess and a key principle of a good handling system is ‘bounce back’, which takes advantage of the sheep’s desire to return from where they came. To take advantage of this, Miriam Parker explained: “Drive the mob through the handling facility, turn 180 degrees and drive them back.”

Other considerations include the gradient; declines should be avoided, along with steep or ‘cliff edge drops’, whereas the size of the sheep entering the race must also be considered.

Where farmers are facing difficultly getting sheep to enter a race, Miriam Parker urged them to check its entrance, adding: “It has been in the books since the 1920s, in order to get the sheep down a race, you need a straight side an you need one side at 30 degrees. Otherwise you are setting it up that everything is going to turn because they can’t see where you want them to go. That would be a critical one for me.”

For farmers looking to improve the effectiveness of their handling unit, Miriam urged them to work sheep through and mark the pinch points; remove the sheep from the setting and then view it as a sheep would. Where adjustments are needed, she encouraged farmers to only make one adjustment at a time and then reassess the effectiveness of the system.

More details on the Teagasc National Lowland Sheep Conference are available here.

Also read: Investing in a sheep handling unit is an investment in yourself