Sheep Walnut Crisis! | Peggy's Little Corner

October 15, 2016

This week the barn addition came to a screeching halt. Once again my youngest sheep, Lily, ate something she shouldn’t have. It seems no matter how closely we watch her she always seems to find mischief. Saturday evening she got hold of a bit of half rotted green walnut shell. I ran to get it out of her mouth, but she still managed to get a piece about an inch by inch. I don’t normally let them into the areas where the walnut trees are in the fall, until the squirrels have had a chance to clean up the fallen nuts, but I have an irritating neighbor who likes to create very loud noises that my sheep are frightened by, so I moved them to a different pasture to escape the noise, and that’s when the trouble began.

Unfortunately for me, my go to vet for my sheep was out of town, so we consulted an online vet. She was very helpful. Her advice was well worth the $50.00 fee. It got us through this crisis until my own vet returned, and then she gave further advice to help Lily heal.

Lily is back to normal, now, but we had a very frightening three days. The green outer shell that Lily got ahold of was enough to make Lily sick, but she didn’t get enough to make her as sick as she was. Meg and Drew quickly discovered, through the help of the online vet, and research online, that it was the mold that was giving the trouble. I think they secretly miss all those college days of having to do research papers. Apparently, the mold contains a kind of penicillin, which can strip the rumen of all of its good bacteria. If left untreated the sheep can develop a condition called timpani belly, where the rumen swells hard like a drum, and if you can’t release the gas they will die. Lily was not eating or drinking anything, and she wasn’t chewing cud, so we were very concerned.

Our emergency course of action, comprised of knowledge gleaned from various sources, was this. We gave her some mineral oil with an oral syringe. The oil is to help reduce gas production in the rumen, but this has to be administered carefully, so that the sheep does not aspirate it into her lungs. Then we administered 2 capsules of active charcoal, following the weight instructions on the side of the box (Lily weighs roughly the same as an adult human). The only thing we could find close to this was some human anti-gas tablets called Charco-Caps. I had to crack open the capsules and dissolve them in enough water to pull up in the syringe. The charcoal was to help absorb any toxins she might have ingested, so she could pass them through her body. All these treatments were excellent for the first 12 hours, but we could see her rumen getting bigger, and she still had not coughed up or chewed any cud in almost 24 hours.

I remembered a treatment that Dobby had been given by his vet. When he was about 2 years old, Dobby had gotten ahold of some poisoned meat that someone buried in a nearby field to kill groundhogs. We believe it was second hand, regurgitated by a coyote, but it was still enough to make Dobby very sick and require a strong course of antibiotics. After the antibiotics, he was given a product called Pro-gut to put the natural flora back in his stomach. So, I thought to use this product for Lily, and that was the turning point. Twelve hours after the pro-gut treatment she was coughing up and chewing her cud and ready to eat apples and her good hay.

Another Lily crisis averted, but I dare say, after three nights without sleep, on a pancake thin mattress, on a hard floor, I’m not going to be making any trips up the barn to help. After a few days rest I will pick up the paint brush again.