We’re now officially in the lambing lull. It’s the break between when the AI lambs and the secondary lambs are due. It’s been a busy and somewhat difficult lambing so far.
Our AI experiment was a rousing success this year! Of the 44 ewes we bred using the AI cervical procedure using frozen semen, 22 of them produced lambs. We may have actually had a 23rd, but either her lamb was stolen by another ewe, or it was stillborn and disposed of by the guard dogs. We may do a parentage verification on the possible stolen lamb. It passed away later, though, so perhaps we won’t. If we did, it would be for academic interest only. If it had lived, we would be sure to do it to verify the pedigree.
That brings us to the difficult part of this year. We lost four lambs shortly after birth. Most years, we don’t lose any. Two of them died from illness. We didn’t check the first lamb, but we verified the second through lab samples. It looks like it was Clostridia Type A, a variety for which the nice, safe vaccine used widely in the UK and elsewhere is not approved here in the US. It’s because of our stupid FDA rules on redoing safety and efficacy trials before approval. One lamb had a birth defect – a deformed face. She died less than 24 hours after birth.
The last lamb we unfortunately had to euthanize. He got injured somehow, and he was three-legged lame. The injury was massive, and while we tried to treat it, he unfortunately fell victim to flystrike in the process. We opted to end his suffering before the flies killed him. It’s never easy, but one of the jobs of the shepherd is to ensure that the lives of our charges are as pain-free as we can manage.
Overall, the lambs are growing well and looking good. We’ve had 75 live lambs born, two stillborns, and four lost, leaving us with 71 beautiful babies. We’ve had two sets of triplets. One set is Ginny’s, and she’s once again doing a good job. She’s a very small ewe and very skinny, so we’re feeding her supplementary grain and have removed her from our grass-fed program. The other set is from a large ewe who could be a decent dairy sheep, so she doesn’t need extra supplementation.
