Barn Math

The scrapie vet and his assistant came out today for our annual scrapie inspection. The inspection is not really a big deal; it's mostly fact gathering and sheep counting. So when they arrived, I pulled on my farm boots and met them out at the barn.

The vet first asked about the size of the flock. Now, any good farmer should be able to answer this without hesitation. Hesitating would be like stopping to think about how many children one has. I, however, do not claim to be a good farmer, and my husband, who normally handled this appointment, was overseas. So I reluctantly admitted that I didn't know how many sheep we had. "Well, that's okay" he said, "We'll just do a quick count." With that, the three of us started counting sheep.

Sheep-counting sounds like an easy task except that sheep don't cooperate. The sheep ran this way and that way. They jumped over the water trough, and continued to run in circles, which made counting them quite a challenge. Our first attempt resulted in each of us arriving at different numbers, and so we counted again. Our second attempt was slightly better: two out of three of us arrived at the same number, and in retrospect, that number was inaccurate. And so minutes went by with three adults counting sheep that were on the run and still no head-count that was spot-on.

We eventually agreed, to our collective relief, that there were fifteen sheep in the barn. Next, we needed to break-down the flock by sex and age - you know, so many rams, so many ewes, and so many lambs. Rams are easy. They're big. They have large, curly horns and have battle scars on their faces. "Three," I said, "We have three adult rams." He wrote this down on his form, a government one, that is.
"All right," he said, "What about lambs? How many lambs were born this year?"
Again I should have known this, but between raising three kids, doing mountains of laundry, working a job, and homeschooling, I honestly hadn't paid much attention to what had been going on in the barn. So, we began to count lambs.

Some lambs were born earlier and were almost as big as some of the smaller ewes. That's why it was a little tricky sorting out what was what. Fortunately, most of the new lambs weren't ear tagged yet, and so this helped. After several minutes, we arrived at the number 'six.' Then, of all things, he wanted to know how many were male and how many were female. Two of the six I knew the sex of. The other four we had to catch and flip over to take a look-see. This was not a quick procedure. We continually kept re-catching the same lamb, which slowed us down considerably.

Once our information was collected, we were down to just ewes.
"Okay," the vet said. "Lets count the ewes now."
It was at this point that I suggested barn math.
"Just subtract the lambs and rams from the fifteen and there's your ewes," I said. Then came an uncomfortably long pause, so I simplified it further. "Six lambs plus three rams equals nine. Now, subtract nine from fifteen and there's your number of ewes."
The two vets stood there silent - neither one volunteering an answer nor working the numbers on a stray piece of paper. "Six," I said. "The answer is six."
"Oh yeah," they both nodded in agreement.

The whole counting episode reminded me of an incident back in college when a classmate named Rick ran for class treasurer with a three word speech. "I can count," he stammered. We all laughed then, but I wouldn't laugh now. I had just spent an hour or so with two other adults, one with a clipboard, and all three of us had a tizzy of a time trying to count. So, maybe I will do a Google search on Rick and ask him to come to Vermont next year in time for my scrapie vet visit.
"What for?" he'll ask.
"Oh, nothing much, to just do what you're good at. Count, count a few sheep that's all."