Hub’s passing

In the summer of 2007 my wife purchased a beautiful big horned ram (for those who don’t know – a ram is a male sheep but not all rams have horns.) She brought him home, we groomed him, and learned how to handle this rather large fellow with a big set of horns.

We entered him in the Ozark Empire Fair and were proud to take home the prize for Grand Champion. This means he was the BEST in the whole show for our breed - Rambouillet.

Next up we planned to show him in the State fair in Sedalia – hoping that we could win there too and have something that would help us market our sheep. Prize-winners and their progeny do much better than just your average wooly creature!

But in the next week or so, he got sick. He ran an extremely high temperature. At times we thought he would die and we even wondered if we should put him down. But we did all sorts of things to save his life – including shearing off his really nice coat of wool.

Bottom line – no state fair for this boy. But we hoped we could nurse him back to health so he could still be used to breed with our flock of ewes.

Over the next few months my wife tried a variety of treatments for what she thought was wrong. He seemed to get better but was never his old self. He walked slowly and his gait was ungainly. And he never – to our knowledge – was able to breed any of our ewes. But he was unbelievably strong so we kept him and continued to treat him.

But then last month he started staying down longer and moving more slowy. One evening I looked in on him and he just had that look that said he was not going to get up and would probably die soon.

Within a couple of days he was dead. We felt bad of course and hoped we had not prolonged his suffering.

Regardless, he was a stately and regal animal and will always be Grand Champion of the 2007 Ozark Empire Fair.