Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the new lamb out of its share of the milk. In any event, both lambs will have
to be supervised carefully.
One worthwhile practice is to save the water bag from a ewe and freeze it
in pint quantities. You can thaw this and pour it over a ewe's nose and onto
the lamb you want her to accept. This is not always successful, but it's worth
trying.
Giving an Orphan to a Ewe That Has Lost Her Lamb
When a ewe delivers a dead lamb and you have a young orphan that needs a
mother, dunk the lamb in warm water containing a little bit of salt and some
molasses. Dip your hand in the warm water and wet its head. By the time the
ewe licks off the salt and molasses, she has usually adopted the lamb. If it is
a lamb that is several days old and does not need the colostrum as much as
a newborn, this gives you an opportunity to milk out and freeze some of the
valuable fl uid.
In all this talk about grafting an orphan onto a ewe, I haven't mentioned
the old way of the “dead lamb's skin.” In that method, if a lamb was born dead
or died soon after birth, it was skinned and the skin was fastened like a coat
over the orphan. Skinning a dead lamb is not simple unless you are already
adept at it. The process is messy and unsanitary because you may not know
why the lamb is dead, and you could be transferring germs and disease.
A cleaner method is to rub a damp towel over the dead lamb and then
rub the towel on the orphan. Before doing this, wash the orphan with warm
water, giving special attention to washing the rear end, which is the fi rst place
that the ewe sniffs in determining whether the lamb is hers.
I remember a postage stamp issued some years ago, showing a ewe with
a lamb. She appeared to be sniffi ng its head. Sheep raisers laughed, as it was
not the usual end for her to be sniffi ng.
The fewer sheep you raise, the less chance there is that another ewe will
be lambing when you need a substitute mother. So if a lamb's mother has
died, has no milk, has been incapacitated by pregnancy disease or calcium
defi ciency, or just outright rejects her baby, you have a bottle lamb.
Bottle Lamb
This is one of the greatest pleasures (and biggest headaches) of sheep raising.
Even if the ewe is weakened by a hard labor or has no milk, she should be
allowed to clean the lamb as much as possible; she will claim the lamb even if
she cannot nurse it, and even as a bottle lamb it can stay with her. If the ewe
