[Jacob-list] Sheep Down-Update

[Purrfleece Farms]

It appears to be the pregnant toxemia.  She seems to be responding to Liquid
Calcium which appears to be a 15% sugar solution with electrolytes given by
mouth.  I just came back from letting her chug-a-lug the bottle again and
I'll repeat it later tonight.  I have a call in to the vet and we will be
discussing aborting the pregnancy.  It may be twins since she has a history.
The one I lost had an aborted fetus beside her when I found her.

The Shetland ewe is up and running around.  They have so much fleece (my
shearer is in Iraq) that if they get down in a low spot, they can have
problems getting up.  I did give her some of the sugar solution and she was
among the 8 that wandered around the place for 4 hours after I forgot to
rehook the gate.  She was fine last night and I saw her working on the
molasses tub.  The molasses tub seems to be really popular with the
yearlings but I have seen any of my older rams over there and only that one
ewe.

I have a horse that my wife rescued from the "glue factory".  The horse is
an American quarterhorser trained to be a rodeo horse but went blind from
drinking water from a pond with deer feces.  They call it "moon blindness".
I think she sees shapes at night but not much in bright sunlight.

Susan used to take care of the sheep and I just followed her directions with
the sheep, horses, burro and cats  while I took care of the chickens and the
market garden.  I don't remember a fortified goat feed and I know there has
never been a tub of molasses/vitamins before since at 110 lb, she would not
have been able to handle it.  Since she died in 2003, I have had to learn
about car registering, cat shots,  west Nile testing,  and a lot of stuff
that she did that I wasn't aware of.

Rich

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Susan Roenke" <oliveoyl_123 at hotmail.com>
To: <pfarms at alltel.net>
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 12:58 PM
Subject: sheep


>
> We are new at this, so don't know too much, but maybe it is the worm
wasting
> thing from the deer?  We had a goat get it, but my 12 yo dd caught it
early
> enough.  You have to worm them every day for a week.  Or could they be
> getting too much corn?  Good luck!
> Sue and Marie
> --__--__--
>
>
>