- Thread starter
- #41
It sounds amazing that she survived, she is lucky you got her. Poor little thing. Damara was the rare sheep you were telling me about one time, right? That forages like a goat, if they're so rare why was he willing to let it die? He wanted to pick a fight that badly?... That sounds like a nightmare with the water and sewer, I think I'd move back to the country if that happened again... I was wondering, is it normal for his stools to change color as he starts eating greens? From yellow to a greenish grey? And its pasty, is that normal? He's still active and playful, and eating honeysuckle and blackberry leaves, is that okay???[SIZE=10pt]Quote:
[COLOR=333333]Thank you for all of this. He's doing much better today, running around and kicking up his heels. His temperature is also going down and he's eating readily on his own again (we cut his feedings in half so he's being pushy for more food.)... I doubt he could have eaten enough grass to cause any sort of upset, and it's highly unlikely that he got anywhere with sewage contaminated grass. Although our dog does think his a mama cow and cleans the calf off so we'll stop him doing that... I always give him warm milk so that shouldn't be the cause. I thought blackstrap molasses acted as a laxative? Is this to purge the system of any toxins?. Did you ever find out what was causing your lamb's scours for so long? Several different things?... I'll be looking into a natural remedy book spon as it seems better than most stuff on the market. Thank you you very much for all your help[/COLOR]
You're welcome and I'm glad to hear he's doing better.
Blackstrap molasses would only be laxative if fed in excess. What is defined as 'excess' of course varies based on multiple factors. Only about a small amount per feed, like a quarter of a teaspoon it seemed, or less, was mixed in the formula I bought for my lamb. It said on the packet that the molasses helped their guts get ready for eating solids and helps them digest them, which corresponds to old information as well as newer info on molasses as a feed additive for ruminants.
As for my lamb's scours, she got it initially from her previous owner not taking any hygiene precautions with her bottle or feed. So all the common bacteria present in a kitchen made its way into her, which is bad enough, but worse in this case. This man did not adhere to even the simplest rules of cleanliness, so the cloths had been used on his bathroom as well as the kitchen, and never rinsed let alone properly washed for six months at a time; he did not believe in disinfecting things. He'd chop raw meats on the wooden benches and not wash them nor the dishes or cloths, so every surface was contaminated to a terrible degree. Because he did not practice any hygiene with her feeding instruments, and used the same cloths for various things, bad bacteria from his fridge, kitchen, and toilet cross contaminated and colonized her very quickly and from two weeks old to about four months she had nonstop scours and flatulence and also had pulpy kidney.
He was going through a bit of dementia/psychosis and kept his herd in an unhealthy state in one tiny badly overgrazed paddock. Her mother rejected her at birth, but later bonded with her for a few days, but then the lamb went down with over 8 female adult paralysis ticks on her, and her mother forgot about her before she regained her feet. So at least initially she had colostrum. While she was paralyzed, in the middle of winter, she was left in an open shed lying in her own urine and feces. I was renting on the property, with her owner being my landlord, and started checking in on her to turn her over to clear her lungs, dry her, treat her, etc, but because he was trying to force a confrontation between myself and him, I didn't get involved overly much.
He had raised orphan lambs successfully before but had used formula, but this time was just being a cruel person to try to provoke a reaction out of me. He would use an old dirty plastic bottle (instead of an easy to sterilize glass one he had which he’d used before with other lambs) and make her up plain milk from the store, extremely diluted, and heated in the microwave. Being two weeks old by that point, she was ravenous and would gorge when twice a day he'd give her a feed. So in desperately trying to get enough nutrients and hydration she would drink until her gut was distended like a football.
Being a Damara lamb she was born only about the size of a half grown cat, so at two weeks old she was still tiny. He'd wait until it was midday for her first feed and let her try to drink two litres in one go, whereas Damara lambs feed up to 10 or so times a day from their mothers, in very short feeding spells, in very small amounts. They are born very tiny and almost double size every week for their first few months. She'd grind her teeth and grunt and whine and sometimes cry out from the pain of her swollen and sick gut. As a general reference, by the time a Damara lamb is ready for weaning, at a few months old, they’re supposed to be drinking around 1.5 litres a day and weigh anywhere around 25 kilos; at two weeks old and weighing a maximum of four kilos, he had her drinking up to two litres in a sitting, twice a day. It was grotesque. Throughout all this she was too paralyzed to even lift her head.
After two weeks she had recovered enough from the paralysis to walk but he'd left her sitting too much, so her front knees had locked in a bent position. At this point I moved out and he gave her to me as I drove away, expecting her to die and be fed to my dogs. I set her up a little sling and massaged her knees, and in 48 hours she went from being unable to walk to galloping around with her front legs bent at right angles. Over the next week this fixed completely all by itself. But the bacteria she'd picked up from his bad hygiene took far longer to eradicate and she nearly died many times. She was twitchy and had constant nightmares and glazed eyes, as animals with toxic guts do, and her poops and farts stank like death. I'm not making a joke there, some bacteria which causes rotting has a smell to it which frightens animals and any human that recognizes it.
One of the first things I did was buy her proper formula and this made a massive difference instantly. They have some powerful probiotic formulas available which colonized her gut so strongly that the established hostile bacteria were almost entirely evicted overnight, though some small troublesome levels of it lingered on for months.
Since then she’s done quite well but has reinfected a few times with bad bacteria because she’s been living in suburbia with a lot of little kids about, plus dogs, and horrible town water. Kids and dogs are incredible disease vectors. The opportunities are endless, lol… But she gets over her temporary infections quickly and without scouring and has grown into a large lamb, and is still growing. For an example of how bad our town water is, we’ve been flooded off the mainland a few times and during these events diseases spread via water everywhere, and the reservior of town water was overflowed into by the sewerage treatment plant which was right next to it. The taps ran brown for a while. Horrible, to be honest. It’s giving me a crash course in what herbs and foodstuffs disinfect the gut, that’s for sure.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=10pt]There have been more issues with her but her first few weeks set the trend and that’s how her scours started. After getting the formula she stopped her visible decline and began to grow rapidly but the scours persisted for a while. Anyway, best wishes with your calf. [/SIZE]
