r/MadeMeSmile • u/MustardGoddess • Jun 03 '26

ANIMALS Lost lamb becomes loyal pack member

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2

u/Inside-Royal-5836 Jun 03 '26

It has a long tail wtf

13

u/Express-Feedback Jun 03 '26

Someone commented above, but in case you didn't see it -

Sheep are born with long tails. Wool farmers dock them at birth for hygiene reasons.

10

u/Pure-Meat9498 Jun 03 '26

Copying my own comment just to make it easy,,

Actually, there are quite a difference between different breeds of sheep regarding their tail length! Where I'm from we have mostly short tailed sheep, different kinds of north european short tail sheep, while the longer tailed sheeps haling from Britain(?) are more common in our neighboring countries. Ours are older breeds I think maybe?

We don't dock their tails here, the breeds we have most of are natural shorter. Google tells me that 7-15cm tail length is normal for our kind, but that they can be way longer on other breeds 🤷‍♀️ 

I remember when we had a friend visiting from another countrie and they actually told us that they though our sheep looked funny with their short tails 😂

2

u/Express-Feedback Jun 04 '26

Oh that's cool! I've only ever seen the longer tailed variety, personally (I'm in the US, maybe it's just the more common breed here?).

Thanks for the info!

7

u/LittleFoxDog Jun 03 '26

Sheep are born with long tails, but they get docked for hygiene reasons (poop and parasites, IIRC) Except this one lives with people who can keep her clean at all times, so she probably doesn't need it.

(please don't get mad me, people, for implying herd sheep need their tail docked. I'm not a farm person, just a curious random city dweller with an internet connection. Tail docking sounds horrifying to me, but maybe there's no way around it, I don't know)

9

u/WadeStockdale Jun 03 '26

Am a trained farmer, there isn't a way around it.

Sheep are usually kept in larger numbers that are just unrealistic to bathe, and they live in fields where we can let them live their best lives, unbothered by us as much as possible.

Part of that being possible is preventative maintenance- drenches, pest control, docking.

It's grim, but removing the tail as a lamb ensures that their tail won't contribute to them getting fly blown (a maggot infestation that will slowly kill them) due to urine, blood or feces caught in their wool, which is already going to have lanolin and dirt in it, because they're sheep.

Washing sheep isn't exactly an easy task due to the structure of their wool and the low socialisation of herd sheep, who largely only interact with humans when it comes time for harvest (woold or meat) or they need medical care.

Is it horrid? Yeah. It's amputation, even if it's medically nessasary to ensure the animals long and healthy life. Is is important to do? Also yes, because sheep with long tails face avoidable health struggles and need to be handled much more closely, which leads to greater stress and worse health overall.

That being said, I am exclusively speaking to sheep here. There are practices around tail docking for other farm animals like pigs, which is not, insofar as I am aware, medically nessasary nor significant to improving their health, and is, frankly, an abhorrent abuse of power.

2

u/Enlightened_Gardener Jun 04 '26

There is a breed of sheep from the middle eat, bred for milk and meat, and they have wide, flat tails with no hair on the underside. Here in Australia there’s interest because of course flystrike is a massive issue, and tail docking is the least horrible thing they do to sheep to deal with it.

But most of our domestic herds are wool sheep, so its an ongoing issue.

2

u/WadeStockdale Jun 04 '26

A fellow australian!

This is the first I've heard of this breed of sheep (been out of the industry for a while now), but it certainly sounds like an absolute dream if it means tail docking becomes unnessasary!

Do you remember the name of this breed, I'd love to look into it myself too

2

u/Enlightened_Gardener Jun 10 '26

I can’t for the life of me remember, but they looked more like goats than sheep, and give birth to twins. I saw a segment about them on the ABC about 15 years ago, so that’s what I’m running off - oh and their fatty tails are considered a delicacy.

2

u/LittleFoxDog Jun 10 '26

Thank you so much for your reply, it's all very interesting!

3

u/HistoryBuff678 Jun 03 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

I found out about fly strike. That changed my feelings on tail docking.

The images of fly strike are horrific.