Let’s dive into halter training your show lambs! This content is right out of my book Show Your Way to the Top on sheep showmanship, but today you are getting it for free. Mastering showmanship starts with basic training at home. Always believe in small beginings. Every great show lamb, starts at the very beginning. Halter training is the beginning of a great journey to the show ring. It begins, in my opinion on the fence.

If possible, tie him inside the pen while training so he is on familiar ground.  Never leave any lamb, trained or untrained, on a halter alone as they can very easily hang themselves. Tie the animal’s head higher than their shoulder and somewhat close (4-6 inches from the fence or post) so they have less room to jump around. When you do this, you will need to watch him. The lamb will often flop over on the ground and play dead. You will need to be sure to give him enough length of halter if this happens.

Usually you will give them a good couple feet of halter and just stand there and wait for them to flop over. Immediately after they fall, scoop them back up onto their feet. This is where you have to be patient, because they really don’t understand what the halter is. If your lamb does not play dead or has passed that phase of training, just let them stand and get comfortable with your presence. While you stand with them, touch their body and legs and rub them. This speeds up the process and gets them used to being handled. You will usually see improvement (depending on the lamb) within a week if you are working every day, even if it is just for five minutes at a time.

As your lamb gets comfortable, increase the amount of touch and rubbing, especially down his legs. Practice picking up the legs and setting them down where you want them to be.

During this part of training, try to identify what your animal needs. Some lambs panic when you touch their belly (usually females) while others jump around or stomp when you pick up a certain leg. For the lamb that completely breaks down, just sit and rub its belly until there seems to be less of a reaction and then stop. When you stop, you are rewarding the good behavior.

If a lamb does not like to have its legs touched, touch them more. Right when they stop jumping or stomping, you stop touching. Give the animal a moment’s break and then repeat the process. This will speed up the training.

The point of this simple training is to get them to learn not to fight the halter, and to tolerate your touching and handling them. By using this process you will see some pretty quick results in some lambs. If you just tied up the lamb and did nothing, the process would take much longer. However, if you spend time with him, touching and getting him used to your presence, you will find that this part of the training process moves quickly.