Rant: WTF is up with you city people?

kuwisdelu said:

Hmm. Cross-posting from here, so is this why you say you need a gun to butcher sheep?

In Zuni, we tie them up and load them in the back of a pickup to drive back them to my grandmother's house to butcher them (it's about an hour drive back to the village).

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Yes. Some get butchered, most get sold. I don't make any money off it. It's really a wash. If I was losing money on it which I would if I didn't at least get my family's meat out of it, if I had to pay someone to butcher, then it would be a loss and I'd have to stop or radically curtail things. My alternative is to raise prices and cater to hobby farms who want pets instead of homesteaders, but I want to help the homesteaders, the people who need help but are willing to work. I don't have a village to help. I don't have an extended family to help. I have 2 kids who can help when they have time and aren't off at college. They aren't willing to do the kill. I don't have the physical strength to not use a firearm.

kuwisdelu said:

Probably true, but a gun certainly isn't absolutely required.

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Try something else when you have nerve damage leaving you with a nearly paralyzed arm and nobody to help

lastlittlebird said:

I'm curious about this... if you're breeding your own sheep, wouldn't it be more efficient to slaughter them around the one year mark (the standard for lamb, at least here) since you're getting new mouths to feed anyway? I would have thought that their most rapid period of growth would be in the first year.
Wouldn't keeping them past a certain point just result in diminishing returns for the amount of pasture they eat?

We raised a few motherless lambs when I was a kid, but that's all the direct experience I've had... sorry if this was a dumb question.

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If you have a breeding population and save some to continue to breed you may want to cull based on conformation, horn status, behavior and or fleece and often you can't make a final determination on one or all of those until about 2 years. Some you can pick out early and they go to slaughter sooner. Others you just have to watch and wait

Pyekett said:

Oh, George. That must have been a hard development, man.

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That's putting it mildly, but surgery to move the nerve helped albeit slowly. Eventually finding the right medications helped. Thankfully both arms weren't paralyzed at the same time. They took turns. Writing became physical therapy. I can do a lot of stuff again, just not for a long time at a time and have had to adjust how I do things. The worst was having to retire from surgery. At least I knew to quit.

I take it back. The worst was when I couldn't manage basic hygiene and the pain was so bad that I prayed to die. For a few years I couldn't even leave the first floor of my house and needed a wheelchair. I'm much better now, but still in no shape to do surgery. One of the Drs said he's going to write it up and name the disease after me.

On that note, I think I'll go soak in the hot tub. That's been helpful.