214 SHEEP BAKNS OE STABLES 



assistance in lambing, or if the lamb required to be helped to the 

 teat, it was difficult to catch her conveniently in an open shed. 



Sheep Barns oe Stables. — For all the preceding 

 reasons, barns or stables for the winter shelter of sheep, now 

 receive universal preference in the Northern and Eastern 

 States. These are generally constructed — and always should 

 be — so that they can be closed as tightly as ordinary 

 horse or cow-bams. But they require doors sufficient for 

 ventilation and exposure to the sun in fine weather, and for 

 the ingress of a farm wagon to haul out manure. And by 

 means of movable windows, or slides covering apertures in 

 the walls, they should be capable of being thoroughly 

 ventilated at any time, with the doors closed. 



When these close sheep barns first came into use, each 

 was generally made large enough for seventy-five or one 

 hundred sheep ; and they were scattered about the farm so as 

 to be contiguous to the meadows from which they were to be 

 filled with hay, and so the manure made in and about them 

 would only require hauling a short distance. There was 

 another argument in their favor. If a contagious or infectious 

 disease broke out in one of the divisions of the flock, it did 

 not necessarily extend to all ; and, theoretically speaking at 

 least, the fewer the sheep which inhale the same local 

 atmosphere the freer from impurities it must remain. 



But serious inconveniences were found to attend this 

 system. It required almost a double outlay of materials and 

 expense to build separate barns and prepare separate yards, 

 arrangements for watering, etc., for each flock. These 

 scattered barns required the farmer or his shepherd to wade 

 wearily two or three times a day, mounted or on foot, for 

 long distances through sheets of snow which the winds 

 generally rendered pathless ; and oftentimes, and even for 

 days together, to do this amidst blinding snow-storms or 

 the most terrible extremes of cold. Much shoveling was 

 constantly necessary to give the sheep access to water, etc- 

 If the supply of hay happened to fail at one of these distant 

 barns, it was often more trouble to get it thei;e, than it would 

 have been to cart all the hay consumed in the barn to a central 

 one near the farm-house, and haul all the manure made from 

 it back. These barns were inconvenient at lambing time, 

 because the constant attention which one man could give to 

 all the breeding ewes at once, if in the same or contiguous 

 buildings, was necessarily divided up between the several 

 scattered parcels of them, leaving but little time, compara- 



