Bob

Bob arrived here in 2006, he had lived with a companion called Annie and when she died he was very lonely.  Bob and Annie were the much loved pets of a family and it was hard for them to part with Bob after Annie passed away but they knew it was in Bob's best interest to be with others of his kind.  Bob was three years old when he came here and has never forgotten how much he likes human companionship so if you go into the field and call he will always come running up to you.  He loves people and he is also very good with young sheep who arrive, Bob is the one who takes new arrivals under his wing and looks after them until they have settled in.  Bob has to have one of the kindest and most loving natures in sheepdom! 

Cloudy (left) and Frosty

Frosty

Frosty and Cloudy
Frosty and Cloudy were early born lambs, Cloudy was found on a hillside beside his dead mother, starving, and was reared by a local lady who then gave him into the care of the young man who had found him and who had already acquired Frosty.  Once off the bottle these two lambs were put into a small paddock and for a long time nobody went near them, a local man who keeps sheep himself started to throw some feed into the paddock and eventually asked us if we take care of them.  They are both males and Frosty had not been castrated but was done shortly after arriving here in June 2008.  They are friendly sheep and allthough Frosty has an impressive set of horns he never uses them on either us or the other sheep. 

Lucky Sam
Lucky Sam is so named because he managed to escape from a lorry carrying him the abbatoir.  There is a lay-by outside Dumfries where livestock transporters often swop a load from one lorry to another and Lucky Sam made good his escape during the process.  The first we heard was when the Police rang to ask if we could assist them with some lost property, Lucky Sam had been found on the roadside and rounded up and penned by a local farmer.  The Police tracked Sam to the market where he had been sold but were unable to locate an owner so we took charge of the "lost property."  Lucky Sam is our wildest sheep, he has been with us since 2005 and is as wild and untrusting of humans now as he was on the day he arrived.  We never try to tame those animals who so obviously do not want to become tame so Sam is caught only when necessary to be shorn, vaccinated, wormed and have his feet trimmed.  In winter when the sheep are trough fed Lucky Sam will not even approach the troughs until whatever human filled them has gone away!

Lara (left) and Norbert

Norbert and Lara
Norbert is a castrated male Suffolk sheep while Lara is a female Cheviot sheep, we are told they were both born in 2001. They arrived here at Mossburn on 9 May 2004, along with two American Buff geese - Nelson and Emma. These creatures were the much loved pets of a family forced to give up the tenancy of the cottage they rented, who were unable to find other accommodation with land for the animals. We cannot take on all the animals that we are asked to take on here, but when a case is as genuine and desperate as this one was, then we will bend over backwards to help. Norbert and Lara are friendly sheep who joined in with our small herd without any trouble and took to coming in at nights from day one. The reason our sheep are all stabled at night is because of their goose friends who cannot be left outside because of foxes, but refuse to come in without their mates - and we wonder why sometimes we get called "the funny farm"!!!

Dinky
We really do not know how old Dinky is, he arrived here back in 2004 and he was  an elderly sheep then and he is now the only survivor of the four who originally came here together.  Their's is a sad but sensible story.  They were owned by a lovely lady called Lynne who adored them and her pony Bramble, Lynne knew that she was terminally ill and two years before her death she made provision with Mossburn that when she finally passed on we would take her beloved pets and look after them for the rest of their lives and that of course is precisley what we did and, in Dinky's case, still do!  Juanita has one abiding memory of Dinky;  when she went to collect the sheep she threw a leg over Dinky, put her hand under his chin and headed with him to the trailer but Dinky had other ideas and took off at a great rate of knots and, much to the amusement of the several onlookers, deposited Juanita unceremoniously onto the ground!  As she says "falling off a horse is one thing but falling off a sheep is quite undignified!"

Buddy as a lamb!

Buddy now!

Buddy
A lady our riding in The Highlands had distressingly passed a number of dead lambs lieing in the fields along her route, she thought she had just seen another when she noticed movement and, dismounting from her horse, she went to investigate.  This one was alive, there was no ewe in sight and the lamb was thoroughly cold so the lady put him inside her coat, remounted her horse and took him home.  Buddy survived and once he was grown and independant his rescuer gave him to a local centre that had a pets corner for children, she thought he was settled for life.  Imagine then her anguish when, at the end of the tourist season, the centre rang to say that Buddy would now be going off for killing along with the rest of the lambs.  As a last resort, nowhere else being willing to take him, she rang us here at Mossburn and Buddy duly arrived in 2008.  He soon joined the rest of the sheep here and became far less human orientated than he had been on arrival, he is still friendly, especailly if you happen to have a biscuit handy, but he is a proper sheep now and no longer a pet.

Larkin

And then Larkin came down from The Highlands as well!!  Really Larkin should not have been born as the farmer with the flock of ewes he came from had decided that he was too old to do another lambing but he went away for a holiday and the person looking after the holding in his absence found a lonely sheep all by itself and turned it out with the flock - it just happened to be the ram!!  Sadly Larkin's mother died giving birth to him but a friendly neighbour said she would rear the orphan and she was brave enough to part with him once he was no longer dependant on her so that he could be amongst his own kind again;  she loved him dearly and parting was a wrench but she comes down from The Highlands to vist and still calls him her Lambkin.  I am writing this in 2009 the year Larkin arrived and as I write I have to say that he did make it into our flock eventually but then got badly fly struck and had to be sheared and as the year was getting on he could not return to the flock outside but had to be kept indoors.  As I write Larkin shares a loose box with three goats and spends his days mugging humans for whatever he can get, getting under our feet and attacking any car that goes too close to him.  He is a rare character and very, very intelligent, he knows for instance how to open the back door of the farmhouse and let himself in.  We all curse him at times but love him all the time, you just can't help it!!  

Henry
... and then there is Henry and as far as Henry is concerned he is a sheep, he has never been in any doubt about it. You might think Henry is a goose, but he would not agree, he is convinced he's a sheep, and he is quite hurt when we shear the sheep in the spring that we do not shear him too! Henry came to us on the 14th of June 2000, with a pony that we had agreed to take in as the owner was moving and could no longer keep livestock. She explained about Henry when we agreed to take the pony and asked if we could take him too if we had sheep here that he could live with. She had no idea why he thinks of himself as a sheep but said that he had always done so and it was impossible to re-home him with the rest of her poultry. He has never shown the slightest interest in any of our poultry or in our pond though he does like a large basin of water to bathe in. He does not really understand why Lara, the ewe he lives with now, does not want to bathe in it too!