Lambs’ Lives

A stereotypical image of lambs is of them gambolling happily in a field, with their mothers close by, looking after them and seeing that they are fed. This is lambs’ existence. But, for some the experience is short, or very short. This is because in the endeavour of sheep farming, ovines are seen as for use. 

If mothers are to give their milk for dairy, their lambs can be quickly removed from them, and thus the lambs will be without their mother’s presence and care and will be fed from a bottle not their mother’s teat. To be meat which is termed ‘lamb’ a lamb will require to be slaughtered young (at some time between age of 10 weeks and 12 months - but most usually when around 6 months old). Lambskin - lamb leather - can arrive from being a lamb meat industry by-product or from slaughter of a lamb directly to be lambskin. The process of ‘getting to be meat’ can have two elements. A lamb is got to a stage but is not yet of best condition and weight to be ready to be meat to eat. It will then be moved from its existing circumstance to another, for bringing it to best state for being meat for the table. In the instance, the lamb will be sold, after first stage of the process, as a store lamb. It will have to endure transportation and likely too the stress of a sheep sale. It should be noted also that there can be ‘ewes with lambs at foot’ (ewes with lambs) sold at sheep sales.

It is a gladsome thing that some lambs do have a full life, in that they are not slaughtered in infancy. It is additionally gladsome if, as well as not having been slaughtered in infancy, lambs have not been made to suffer in other ways during their infancy. 

Lambs who are not slaughtered when young, are: those lambs which humans keep to give the lambs adulthood and entirety; those lambs which are kept to grow up to be adult sheep and to breed lambs; those lambs which humans keep to increase the number of sheep which they have. 

Sadly, for a quantity of lambs, they neither get to experience the full span of life, nor do they have much good or joyous existence as lambs.