Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose.
We lost 109 Daron today. She went into an unusual labor, and I couldn’t get the lamb out. It felt weird. I talked to our vet about options. A C-section would have been $300 at minimum with no complications. Realistically, it would have been more like $500+. It’s not economically viable to spend that much money on a nine-year-old ewe. I had several options, but none were good. I tried and tried, but I could not shift the lamb, positively identify the parts I was feeling, or have any hope of getting those parts out. We worked for quite a while, but Daron unfortunately went into shock and was losing too much blood. Per vet instructions, we shot her, and I quickly cut her open in the hope that there was a live lamb in there.
The deformed lamb weighed 31 pounds. Daron was perhaps 75 on a good day. There was no way we’d have gotten that mass out without a C-section, and it was long dead. There was no live lamb behind it, either.
On the bright side, while we were dealing with that disaster, 322 Gwenda successfully lambed a set of twins – one ram and one ewe. She had them out, up, dry, and nursed before we were done with Daron. Gwenda’s lambs are doing fine in spite of our horrendous winds.
We’re expecting snow tonight and tomorrow, so we loaded six bales of hay into the pasture. It’ll act both as extra food for the ewes and as shelter for the lambs. We have two ewes looking close, but I think they’ll wait until tomorrow.