[Jacob-list] horns

[Grose]

10 lb. lambs? Ours run 3 to 8 lbs. We lamb 60 to 70 ewes a year, about 75% are Jacobs and the rest are FinnXCotswold. The FinnX are the only ones that have more than twins. I last assisted a birth about four years ago when one of the FinnXs had quints and tried to push two out at once. She lost those two but kept the rest. [That ewe raised 32 lambs in eight years.] I once had a feed sales man question whether a lamb that weighed 5 lbs. at birth would be big enough to nurse. I seldom see lambs born, lamb on pasture [OK muddy lot] and basically never see them until they have already nursed. We do lose some, but they are usually born so quickly that I wouldn't have a chance to assist. A few years after we got the sheep, I found a lamb that had probably been born backwards, alive but with considerable fluid in his respiratory tract. I had read that you could take the lamb by the hind legs and swing it around and empty the fluid by centrifugal force. So that's what I did and it seemed to work. After checking the lamb and seeing improvement I decided to try a little more. This might have worked had not the old ewe been excessively curious to figure out what the #$%&* I was doing and walked in the way. Slamming a lamb against a set of horns as hard as you can is not recommended as a resuscitation technique.

Neal Grose
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Betty Berlenbach 
  To: jacob-list at jacobsheep.com 
  Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 8:20 AM
  Subject: [Jacob-list] horns


  HI, Robin,

  Occasionally, I find, if a lamb is overdue, or I've been feeding them too much, and it is a 10 pounder, the horn buds are grown out an inch or half inch, and mama has a hard time (I shudder to think what that'd be like!) Usually, in these cases, the lamb is yellow, from old meconium into birth fluid.  I've never had any problems however, other than mama has a longer labor, and occasionally, I'll massage her cervix or help get horns through at the end, one at a time.  I do see most of the births here, and mostly, it just seems the equivalent to delivering a 10 pound human baby instead of a 6 pound one! A little longer, a little harder, but these tissues were made to stretch, and they do.
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