Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Our Sick Sheep

We have a sick ewe. She is two years old and gave us a fine, little ewe lamb this past July.
Her name is Jihad and we gave her that name in jest. She is a Scottish Blackface. Here is a photo of her we took this past Saturday....
You may be asking, what happened to Jihad? Well, we thought at first it was mastitis since she seemed to be in the process of weaning her lamb. I gave her 3 days of penicillin but she did not improve. She was off her feed and very emaciated. She was grinding her teeth in pain so we got three days of Banamine from our vet to help her. We noticed her her moving very slowly and her hind quarters appeared stiff when she walked....then I remembered the attack by Neo,our miniature horse, from a few weeks ago. The lady that rents our pasture for her border collie training was out working her sheep that day. I herded our flock towards the back of the pasture. Neo came storming out of the east paddock and started chasing our sheep. From a distance. I saw him tromp one of our sheep with his hooves. He had the sheep on the ground, stomping and biting the sheep on the back of the neck.I came running to check the sheep that was still lying on the ground, but the sheep was up and away before I could reach it. From that distance, I thought it was Malcolm, another of our Scottish Blackface sheep. I noticed Jihad lying in the barn about five days after the event and that's when we started treating her. Needless to say, Neo doesn't live here anymore !
It has been a real challenge to get Jihad to eat. We have been giving her Survive orally and that seems to have improved her appetite......for cat food! She got out of her stall the other day while I was fighting our Boer goats who had broken the chain on their stall and were heading for the hay. I ran over to shut the barn door, turned around, and there was Jihad chowing down on the cat food. It was the first time I had seen her eat with enthusiasm for a couple of weeks.

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