May 2013

For the first time ever, I felt a little depressed by the end of lambing this year. Don’t get me wrong, we have some beautiful, strong and healthy lambs, but we also have a few that were born with lower than expected birth rates, needed help at lambing, and are still well behind where they ought to be by now

Our final ewe lambed on the 11^th of May, a full month after the first (meaning she had failed to conceive on the first service). This is a far from ideal situation as it means either the older lambs receive essential treatments later than the ideal time, or the younger ones are treated earlier than is recommended. In addition to being late, both her lambs decided to enter the world headfirst – not the easiest exit, especially as the ewe was a maiden (her first lambing). So, my heart sank rather when I first spotted the first lamb’s head grinning at me from her back end, it’s tongue lolling out, but thankfully not too swollen. Sometimes it’s possible to slide a hand in alongside the head and ease a leg forward, in this case the ewe’s pelvis was just too narrow, so the next option was to push the lamb back inside where there’s a bit more room to work in! Eventually, he and his brother, who was equally badly presented, were born, but the first lamb had a ‘wonky’ foreleg: there were no fractures and it didn’t seem to cause any pain, but it stuck out to the side and he wasn’t putting weight on it. The following day, a trip to the vet with the lamb in a Walkers Crisps cardboard box confirmed that he had uneven growth plates in his leg: it may resolve itself, or it may not. Well, three weeks on and he’s leaping about with the rest of them – a happy ending.

All in all, not our best year, but now we have to concentrate on maximising their potential and rearing healthy lambs! Thankfully, the grass was just beginning to put on a bit of growth – at least they’d have a bit of spring grass to give them a boost!



After the long hard winter and cold spring, all our grazing was quite poor, and both our horses had lost a bit of condition. At their age (they’re both in their late teens, but lively and in generally robust health) there’s always the possibility that their natural immunity to all sorts of things can start to drop off. We’ve kept them both on a ‘clean grazing – 4 x per year testing – no worming’ regime for nearly 8 years now [see 'Management of Gut Worms in Horses' article] and they’d missed this year’s annual blood-testing for tapeworm (as the presence of tapeworm is not shown in a FEC), so we decided to worm both horses with Praziquantel a narrow-spectrum product that specifically targets tapeworm and, as horses and sheep share pastures, this drug won’t contribute to wormer resistance in our sheep.
Once the last lamb is born and before we turn them out onto the pasture, all but one (generally the fattest one!) of the ewes are given a drench of Cydectin (a group 3 wormer that has a persistent effect) so they don’t immediately contaminate the ground for the lambs. For some years now we have been using worm resistance/ resilience (ie. retaining those that have consistently low egg counts, and those that maintain good condition and have consistently clean backsides!) as one of the factors for selecting replacement breeding ewes, so this one anthelmintic treatment is generally their one and only for the entire year. Turnout is also a good time to check and treat all the ewes’ feet, as we tend to try to avoid tipping heavily pregnant ewes so there are always one or two whose need a bit of attention. The next few weeks seems to me that we are doing one treatment after another for the lambs – it’s always a busy time:

• The rams (our stock ram + two companions), having been mostly ignored while the ewes hogged all the attention during lambing, now get a gentle pedicure and a fresh paddock;
• The lambs get their first Heptavac-P vaccination at around 6 weeks (another reason I dislike a strung-out lambing period, as some get this earlier than the ideal age;
• The lambs also have their first yummy drench to protect them from Nematodirus, which is rife this year. The required drench in this case is a white, Group 1 drench – ideally, this would be one containing Albendazole, but since we had a huge bottle of Panacur (containing Fenbendazole) on the shelf, we used this; it’s the same drench group but a different chemical composition and on many farms even Nematodirus, which is still susceptible to Group 1 drenches, has developed resistance to this specific chemical. Note to self: carry out a worm egg reduction test for this compound! 

Well, that was May – chilly and hard work … and June doesn’t get much better as you’ll soon see since this particular diary is late being posted, and will quickly be followed by the June entry!

 

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