DESPITE the cold winds, this year's lambing has gone fairly well for most Scottish sheep farmers.

Not everyone had it easy. An unseasonal Arctic blast, which brought snow and hailstorms sweeping into areas in the north at the beginning of the last week of April killed many young lambs.

The tiny bodies of newborn lambs with their long legs, ears and tail have a large surface area in relation to their body mass and soon cool down in cold wet weather. That leads to hypothermia and death.

That risk can be dramatically increased by stupid ewes, particularly inexperienced gimmers lambing for the first time, giving birth on exposed sites rather than in the shelter of a dyke or hedge.

While sheep farmers in areas that included Caithness, West Highlands and the Cairngorms counted the cost of that Arctic blast, they will have to accept that most springs have bad days that are best forgotten.

Lambing time can be incredibly enjoyable if the ewes are fit and the spring is early and warm.

Sometimes a warm, dry lambing conducted in shirt sleeves can turn out to be more difficult than you might expect if the ewes are too fit and give birth to lambs that are larger than usual. That can lead to a lot of hard work and losses as a result of big lambs getting stuck at birth - and that has been a common complaint this year.

Another problem in a year like this when ewes are fitter than usual is "stealing". Fit pregnant ewes, with udders swollen with milk can become anxious to "mother" a lamb and let it suckle before she has given birth to her own lambs. When a ewe lies down to have a second or third lamb a stealing ewe will fuss over unattended newborn lambs and steal them away from their true mother. As they lick them and encourage them to suckle her, the stealing ewe imparts her smell to the stolen newborn. End result is that when you return a stolen lamb to its rightful mother, she doesn't recognise its smell and rejects it. That can lead to a lot of extra work persuading her to accept it as her own.

In such cases most put the ewe in a lamb-adopter, a penning arrangement that holds the ewe firmly by the neck in a kind of stocks, that prevents her from seeing or smelling her lambs. She can comfortably stand and feed or drink, or lie down whenever she wants, and the lambs lie by her side and suckle her whenever she is standing.

The idea is that after a couple of days both of her lambs will smell the same as her, and she will accept them as her own - well that's the theory. It doesn't always work and quite a few ewes never accept stolen lambs as their own.

I have even resorted to sprinkling cheap perfume on the nose of the ewe and the backs of the lambs. That tactic of confusion has sometimes worked in difficult cases - but not always. Stubborn ewes often win and you end up lifting the rejected lamb and fostering it onto another that has had a dead one.

There is nothing more soul-destroying than finding a ewe standing with several stolen lambs, where you have to guess who their rightful mothers are. Some stealing ewes can cause such mayhem in a lambing field that they have to be caught and penned or put in a field all by themselves until they finally produce their own lambs.

While it's grand to see a field full of fast-growing lambs, all too soon they are ready for slaughter from about 12 weeks of age onwards. It's a sad fact of life that all farm animals are ultimately slaughtered for meat. There is no room for sentiment on a farm, as we must always remember that a farmer's job is to produce food.

Most of our production is prime livestock - that is to say young poultry, pigs, sheep or cattle that are slaughtered, as the name implies, in their prime - but there are also the older breeding animals that are culled and slaughtered at the end of their productive lives.

Farmers aren't hard-hearted, callous people. We care for our animals as best we can, and often become attached to them, but we also have to remember that we keep animals for food.

ENDS