Births, Deaths and Marriages...

It has been a month since I last wrote my blog, I have discovered in that time that life on a farm is a roller coaster!  It has been a month of highs and lows.  We have had births, deaths and marriages!

Deaths
About three weeks ago I found one of the lambs laying down on its side in the field, this is most unusual, sheep lie down on their tummies with their legs tucked under them.  I went down to check and he didn't move, I thought he was dead but then noticed his eyes moving.  I picked him up and moved him into another field away from the others, gave him hay and water but I realised he was a gonna, he couldn't hold his head up, was scouring (diarrhea) - if you are squeamish move on to the next paragraph.  I tried cleaning him up and then discovered thousands of maggots crawling about his back end, he had blow fly, probably the worst sickness a sheep can get.  I rang our friend Don and asked him what to do, he didn't think he would last until the morning and I had to agree that he was probably right.  Next morning he was dead.  I gave all the goats and sheep an oral dose of Cydectine, which is for internal parasites. 

A day or so later I noticed that one of the goats was scouring and had lost a lot of weight.  My friend Denise was coming over to give the goats their annual injection of Coglavax, which is for the prevention of Clostridial infections. Clostridial diseases are caused by anaerobic bacteria that are in the environment, particularly in soil, the disease is quite often fatal. I have never given injections before, I am terrified of injections, but I knew that I had to get over my fear if I was to keep animals, I managed to do one injection.

 I contacted the vet to see if I needed to do anything else.  The vet diagnosed Liver Fluke based on the fact that the diarrhea was green and the animals were on damp pasture.  All my animals were brought to our farm within six weeks of each other and we didn't have a history of vaccinations for some of them.  I now know that I should have dosed them with everything immediately and it would have been sensible to keep them all separate for at least a month after each arrival, in effect keeping each set in isolation, however even if I had known this I didn't have the facilities available to do this.  The vet wrote a list of various vaccines available to combat Liver Fluke and suggested I contact a neighbour with sheep to ask to buy some from him, this is because he sells the vaccine with enough for 60 sheep, I only had 6 plus the 5 goats.  The vet also wrote out the dose to give each animal based on their weight (more of that later).  My neighbour with the sheep wasn't in so I contacted my good friends Doug and Rhoda at La vie à la petite ferme, they had a vaccine called Oestrocur and Doug kindly offered to come and help me vaccinate the goats and sheep.  I would not have been able to do the vaccinations without Dougs help, it is definitely a two man job. I was shaking like a leaf as I gave the injections, but we managed to do the sheep and then moved on to the goats.  Two bits of advice here;

1. For adult standard size goats you need somebody strong to keep hold of them, they tend to move as soon as the injection goes in, pulling the needle out or bending it.  The best way to keep them still is to straddle them and hold onto their horns.
2. Make sure with sheep that you have an animal marker to mark the ones you have done, not so much a problem with goats as they are usually quite distinctive. My sheep are all the same breed and there were three that looked very similar

Unfortunately my inexperience caused another problem. The vet had written down quantities of treatment, although he hadn't written down Oestrocur as one of the treatments.  Doug commented that the amount we were giving was much more than they had given and more than it said in the instructions, I assumed this was because the animals already had the disease rather than the treatment being preventative.  Wrong, I overdosed them.  Another lamb died a few days later and I will never know if this was because of the overdose of treatment or because she had already succumbed to the disease.  Well life has to go on, the remaining sheep were moved to new pasture and seem to be thriving. I am no longer putting them directly on the pasture the goats have been on.  Henry the goat also had the illness but has made a great recovery, he is very skinny but I am tether grazing him on fresh land each day and hopefully he will soon gain back the weight he lost.

Births

Well as I have said, there is never a dull moment. Within a week of the lambs dying, our sow Wrinkles finally gave birth to seven healthy piglets, unfortunately there was one stillborn, but the seven seem happy and healthy.  Within hours of their birth the piglets were up and about, slightly wobbly on their feet but moving around much more than I thought they would be.  I had to dash off to buy chicken wire to put on top of the pig wire because they are so small they can fit through the gaps in the pen fencing.  

Wrinkles feeding the piglets a few hours after their birth

They were born two weeks ago, and it is amazing how much they have grown!  Here is a photo of them a few days ago with their cousins 'The Three Little Pigs'...more on them later.

The ten piglets playing together 29th September 2013

Marriages

Well all I can say on this subject is that Bandit the goat has eyes only for Maisy....they are acting like a pair of newly weds, lets hope we will hear the patter of tiny goat feet in the spring.

Next blog....The Tale of the Three Little Pigs!