Weaning lambs

Tonight will be a noisy night. Bleating will carry over the barns and penetrate through dreams. Several times I will be half out of the bed in Pavlovian response before I remember that today the lambs were weaned and their calls are unlikely to be due to being caught in fencing, fox attack or rustling. The ewes have been put into a field with a minimum amount of grazing to dry up their milk, and their lambs are on rich pasture in the orchard to fatten. They will share the orchard with the geese whose diet is also grass, and I must remember each morning to shut the goose hut door once the birds are out, or the lambs will bounce up the ramp and bash around inside the hut, causing damage with their sharp little feet and growing girths.
A decade ago, new to sheep, I was devastated to come home to find two unknown but happy Jack Russells, one still a pup, blood dripping from their jaws, yapping in hysterical excitement in the garden. I shut them up in the porch and went into the field to find three ewes down, their cheeks torn out, their tails ripped, their lambs unharmed. The vet came and humanely destroyed the ewes. I said to him, naively, that their lambs hadn't yet been weaned. "They have now" was his blunt but right response.