Drugged Up Sheep

My main animal related job today was to give the sheep their worming treatment before moving them to their new pasture. I only have five sheep and I managed to catch four of them within minutes and administer the drug, Col the fifth and largest of our sheep evaded capture, as always. 

Col is a strange sheep, very serious, very cautious, if he was a person I would say he probably has a similar personality to Gordon Brown, the UK ex-Prime Minister (not sure whether to apologise to Col or Gordon for this comparison), if Col was human he would definitely be an accountant or a tax inspector!

Anyway I digress. The problem now is that when you worm animals kept together they all need to receive the treatment, preferably within a short time of each other. All of the flock are then kept on their existing pasture for 3-5 days, although opinion varies and depends on the treatment given, this allows them to pass any worms on pasture that will then not be reused in the immediate future. The animals are then moved onto clean ground and hopefully remain healthy and happy. 

Because of Cols lack of enthusiasm for taking his medicine I am now waiting for Steve to get back from work so that we can hopefully catch him by surprise this evening. I am sure it will be a surprise as it is now pitch black outside and we are going to be trying to catch him by head torch light! Having lived In Yorkshire before moving to France I heard many a tale of strange goings on in the dark with sheep! I now know it was nothing untoward, just some poor shepherd trying to do his job.  Animals can be so ungrateful.

Whilst waiting  for Steve to arrive home, I shall regale you with the interesting details of the drug I am using on the sheep, obviously not very interesting to anyone that doesn't keep sheep, so you might want to skip a couple of paragraph. I am using a worming treatment called Cydectine, according to the instructions it should be administered every 4-6 weeks, it kills one type of worm in 4 weeks and another in 5 weeks, BUT there is a lot of debate about the build up of immunity, common sense would suggest that the more often you use a drug the quicker the immunity will build up.  Researching the worming of sheep on the Internet will result in greater confusion, although in general most owners of sheep seem to rotate the brand of wormer to control immunity, the timing of worming varies considerably.  There are of course some valid reasons for this variation, in particular the environment in which your sheep live, if you live in a hot country one would assume that there is a greater risk of contamination, the less land you have in which to rotate the sheep or the more sheep you have per square meter can also increase the risk of contamination, there are so many variables that it makes it difficult for a newbie to know what to do.

Each animal carer must use common sense to decide what drugs to administer and how often, but this common sense only comes about with experience, there can be a very steep learning curve to gain this experience. Before we started keeping animals, I thought I had researched the subject quite well, but things did not go according to plan.  My plan was to get some goats as we have 12.5 hectares of land that was half and half pasture and woodland, that was what the cadastral recorded the land as, but after between 5 - 10 years of no animals grazing on the land it was hard to call it anything other than bramble and bracken fields. That is were the goats came in, they would clear the brambles and bracken which would allow grass to grow again and then sheep could be grazed on the grass.  So the plan was put into action, five goats arrived, they cleared sections of land and then seven sheep arrived to munch the grass, except after a couple of weeks we had a very poorly goat and the sheep were not thriving, they had scour (diarrhea).  Both goats and sheep came from the Gers, very dry compared to our mountainous region, our land was damp and marshy even in the height of summer, I thought the change had caused the health problems.  A day later a lamb died, another was very poorly and the goat was emaciated looking, I went to the vets to discuss the situation.  The vet immediately diagnosed liver fluke (Douve in French), he also asked me about their worming program and I had to admit that I had no idea about it, I hadn't even asked when I acquired the animals.  All the animals were wormed and given a liver fluke treatment immediately.  Unfortunately another lamb died and this may have been due to my inexperience. I didn't think to mark the sheep as we gave them their treatments and at this point I didn't really know the sheep individually, it is possible that I inadvertently gave one sheep two doses of treatment and another missed out altogether.  After this fiasco I read up more on sheep illnesses and treatments and found that I should have quarantined any new animals coming in for a couple of weeks and given them the treatments if I didn't know their previous history. My plan to have the sheep follow the goats over each pasture was quickly modified, each group now has a completely separate set of grazing areas, over time I will go back to my follow-on plan but there will be periods of months between the goats grazing on a plot and the sheep then going onto the same pasture.  I also ensure that I worm both sets of animals within a few days of each other despite them not coming into contact with each other. 

I still face dilemmas regarding routine medical treatments, I don't want my animals to be pumped full of chemicals, we are trying to live an ecological life here, but I also don't want my animals to suffer needlessly. I am now trying to use common sense to determine the best course of treatments. The last time I wormed my animals was September, they all seem fairly healthy but I am worried I am pushing my luck, and one thing I have learnt about sheep is that when they become ill the speed at which they succumb is phenomenal. Two sheep will be going to the abattoir soon and Eleanor my alpine goat has just given birth, her kid won't have any natural resistance, but can gain some resistance from her mother if the mother is wormed within a week of giving birth. So I am biting the bullet and re-worming. I will re-treat in March before the weather starts to turn hot, summer is the worst time for parasites causing health problems.

Eleanor with her kid January

Since starting to write this post Steve has returned, we went off in the dark to capture Col, mission completed.  When we got to the sheep pasture Col and two other sheep were outside the fence, as we walked up Col launched himself at the net fence and got his horn stuck in it, I grabbed him, Steve held onto him whilst I loaded up the vile and it was all over in minutes. There are some things you just cannot do on your own, giving Col his medicine is one of them.