Why sheep condition is judged by hand, not eye
A sheep in full fleece can look magnificent and be thin underneath it; the wool stands out from the body and fills every outline your eye would use on a horse or a cow. That is why sheep condition scoring is a hands-on technique rather than a visual one, and why it suits a monthly rhythm so well: the change you are steering by is a slow creep of fat cover over the loin, invisible from the gate but obvious to fingers. Score by touch, on a one-to-five scale running from emaciated to very fat, and you have a number that can be compared between months, between groups, and between the people doing the handling.
Taking a score at the loin
Run the sheep into a pen or race so each animal can be handled calmly for half a minute. Place your fingers over the loin, just behind the ribs, and feel two things: the sharpness of the upright bones of the spine and the ends of the short horizontal bones beneath your fingertips, and how much fat and muscle covers both. On a thin sheep the bones are sharp and individually obvious with no covering; on a fat one they are buried and hard to find at all; a sheep in middling condition has smooth, rounded cover that you can feel through with firm pressure. Score every animal in a small flock, or a solid sample of each grazing group in a larger one, and record the spread rather than a single average — the tail of thin sheep inside a middling group is the finding that matters.
Turning this month's scores into next month's feed
The scores steer feeding because they arrive before the problem does. A group whose bulk has slipped a half-score since last month is telling you the grazing or forage is no longer holding them, and the response — move them to the better field, open the next bay of hay, start the supplement earlier than planned — is cheap now and expensive in a month. A group creeping upward can come off the best ground and save it for the sheep who need it. Work group by group rather than across the whole flock: breeding ewes, growing lambs and old sheep live on different curves, and one flock-wide ration hides the group that is quietly losing. The monthly habit also catches the individual oddity — the sheep scoring far below her group — who should be pulled out for a closer look at teeth, feet or general health rather than simply fed more.
The stages when the check matters most
Any month is a good month to score, but the readings carry extra weight at the hinges of the shepherd's year: before the ram goes in, when ewes should be fit rather than fat or thin; through the run-up to lambing, when condition lost is hard to win back; and at weaning, when you can see what lamb-rearing cost each ewe and feed her recovery accordingly. A run of monthly scores across those stages becomes the flock's feeding diary, and keeping that diary in KinsLe's Pet Passport — the packet where each group's records sit together, ready for a vet visit or a change of shepherd — means the trend is there in black and white when you plan the season's grazing, rather than reconstructed from memory at the pen gate.