Sheep are mostly binary creatures: Zero or One. Either they are strong and healthy, or they’re dead. There isn’t much in between. Once they’ve lived for 24 hours, they are likely to do well for the rest of their lives. But the exception to that rule is when they’re lambing.
Sheep farmers of today are not like Biblical shepherds. When the Bible was written, time was measured by most people in days, or fractions of days, according to the movement of the sun. Shepherds could take the time to search for a lost sheep, or dress the injuries of a sheep that had been mauled. These days, when time is measured in milliseconds by clocks based on atomic decay, time is money, and usually, a problem sheep isn’t worth the time it takes to deal with it. A lost sheep is a write-off, and an injured sheep is put out of its misery. If a sheep has problems lambing, she’s marked for culling if she survives.
As a backyard sheep farmer, I’m somewhere in between the Biblical shepherd and the large-scale sheep farmers. My sheep live in fenced fields, so if they go missing, it’s because something or someone took them. If they are injured, I do my best to get them through it, but if it’s clear that they’re not going to make it, I end their suffering with a hollow point round. If they have problems lambing, I balance that against the quality of their fleeces. I’ll keep an ewe that I can’t breed if she has a nice enough fleece. I like sheep, and most of mine are in a gray zone between “livestock” and “pet”.
I’m going to describe three different times when things went wrong during lambings, what caused it, and what I learned from it. If you’re considering getting sheep, please don’t let these cases scare you off. Most of the time, sheep have their lambs with no assistance from any human, and they do just fine.
Case #1
My favorite sheep ever was a Cotswold ewe with a distinctive voice that earned her the name Calliope. (Yes, I name my sheep. I named our beef calves, too, with names like Stroganoff and Wellington.) Calliope was a big, friendly critter who would walk up to me and turn her head to ask me to scratch behind her ears. She usually had a large single lamb, with no help from me. But the fifth year that she was bred, things were different.
Calliope went into labor about a week early. A week is a significant fraction of a five-month gestation period, so I assumed that the lamb was dead. But recognizing the hollow in front of Calliope’s hips as an indication that the lamb had dropped into position and was ready to be born, I confined Calliope in a lambing pen, and watched and waited.
Normally, sheep deliver their lambs in about two hours. If they don’t, something is wrong. If labor goes more than four hours, the sheep isn’t likely to live. In Calliope’s case, she had hard, painful contractions for almost two hours, with no result. Finally, I scrubbed up and rinsed my hands and arms with iodine surgical scrub, and put my hand up the birth canal to try to get things moving. My fingers searched for front hoofs and a nose.
What my fingers found was a strange, pulpy mass.
I was at a complete loss. I had dealt with breech presentations, and knew what that feels like. This wasn’t that. There was no tail. There were no hooves. There was nothing in my experience that matched what I felt. For another 45 minutes, I watched Calliope, and racked my brains for something that matched what my fingers felt. Nothing came to mind.
If you’re wondering why I didn’t call a vet, it’s because I’ve never known a vet who treated sheep. If you decide to raise sheep, you do your own vet work. You learn by experience and through networking with other small-scale sheep farmers.
At the three-hour mark, I checked the mass in the birth canal. It hadn’t moved much, and Calliope was weakening. I gave her a turkey baster full of a mixture of wine, warm water, and honey to restore her strength, but it had little effect. Whatever that mass was, I needed to get it out soon or Calliope would die of exhaustion.
I reached up into the birth canal, got the best grip that I could on that mass, and started pulling. It took a fair amount of force to get it moving, and it was probably 20 minutes before it finally came out. I stared at it for a few minutes before I figured out what it was.
The medical term for what had occurred is “uterine prolapse”. Under the best of circumstances, the animal can be saved but can never sustain a pregnancy. This was not the best of circumstances, because the prolapsed uterus was covered with strange, oddly colored growths. I was looking at cancer that had likely spread. The best solution was to end her life quickly and humanely, which I did.
Could this have been avoided, and could Calliope have been saved? I ran this by the vet who treated our horses, and he was emphatic that it was unavoidable. Cancer is rare in sheep, and it’s usually fatal. Calliope may or may not have had the cancer when she was bred (the lamb inside the uterus was about a quarter of the normal size, and had died before delivery), but there were no outward signs. The only lesson learned here was that I can’t always save either the ewe or the lamb.
Case #2
My friend, Wayne, called me because he had a ewe that had been in labor for more than two hours, with no sign of a lamb. Would I come over and see what I could do? I grabbed a few items and headed over.
What I saw was not encouraging. The ewe was lying down and looking weak, and I could see the hard contractions rippling across her abdomen.
The first thing I did was to scrub up, rinse with iodine surgical scrub, and reach inside the ewe’s birth canal to try to figure out what the problem was. (If you’re not willing to reach inside a ewe’s birth canal during a difficult labor, don’t get sheep.) What I felt alarmed me: I felt a rock-hard cervix that had not started to dilate after more than two hours of labor.
I had grabbed some plastic tubing and some propylene glycol as I was leaving home. Ruminants convert propylene glycol to usable sugar really quickly, and when an animal is ketotic, it can be lifesaving. This animal was unquestionably ketotic, and that was the first problem that I had to address. I threaded the plastic tubing down the ewe’s throat, felt for air coming out of the tubing to make sure that the tube wasn’t in the lungs by mistake, and gave the tube a sniff to make sure (the smell of even an empty stomach is easy to distinguish from the lungs, which don’t usually have a discernable odor). The tube was in the stomach, so I administered the glycol.
The effect of the glycol is almost immediate, and almost miraculous. I’ve seen sheep go from completely limp to fighting me in seconds. In this case, there was a good effect, but it wasn’t as pronounced as I had hoped, which wasn’t a good sign. I had Wayne hold the ewe’s head while I reached inside the birth canal and alternated between gently massaging the cervix and thrusting my finger into the cervical opening to try to dilate it. Initially, there was almost no dilatation, but after about an hour, I could get my index finger in, which is about 1.5 centimeters.
The math that I was doing in my head was not encouraging. At that rate, it would take four hours for the ewe to dilate to six centimeters, and even with glycol, it was unlikely that she’d make it. I explained this to Wayne. He listened to my explanation without a word. Then he left the barn.
He came back with an old single shot .22 rifle and a couple of rounds. He handed them to me, and walked out, never saying a word.
What did I learn in this case, and what should I have done differently? Subsequent research revealed that the condition is called “ringwomb”. I had never heard of it. The cause is unknown. The textbook solution to the problem was to try what I did, and if unable to dilate the cervix, deliver the lambs by Caesarian section. I’ve never had a veterinary surgical setup, and Wayne didn’t, either. (Neither of us had the knowledge to do surgery, anyway.) This sheep couldn’t have been saved by any means that we had. While she could have been saved by a timely C section, she could never have been bred again. The cost/benefit analysis here is that the C section would have cost more than the three sheep (the ewe and two lambs) that Wayne lost, and at some point, cost has to figure in.
Case #3
Recently, I had two sheep lamb in two days. The first lambing went without a hitch, or so I thought. The lambs were big and beautiful. After a few hours, I started to be concerned. The lambs seemed sluggish, and uninterested in feeding. I milked the sheep and got some colostrum, which I mixed with warm sugar water and fed the lambs with an irrigation syringe. I did the same thing again the next morning, and noticed the second sheep was starting active labor. She had a thread of clear mucus hanging from her vulva, so I expected a lamb in an hour or two. Sure enough, when I checked later, she had delivered a big, beautiful ram lamb. There was no sign of a placenta yet, so I left her for another two hours. The other lambs, born the previous day, were still behaving sluggishly, and not trying to feed. The mother was doing all the right things and making mothery claiming sounds, but the lambs weren’t responding, and weren’t trying to suck when I fed them from the syringe.
Two hours later, when I checked the sheep for a placenta, I saw a single hoof protruding from the birth canal. If things were going well, I should have seen two hooves. Reaching inside the birth canal, I felt a nose (good) but not another leg (not good). However, this isn’t too difficult to deal with. The right position for a lamb to be delivered is like a diver going headfirst into water: The head is between the two front legs as the lamb comes down the birth canal and out. This lamb had one leg folded back, and was caught. I moved my hand back along the lamb’s neck, down to the shoulder. I pressed in on the shoulder, and while maintaining pressure, slid my fingers down until I could hook the leg and pull it forward.
Once that was done, the lamb slid out fairly easily. I wiped the membranes off its nose so that it could breathe, and started wiping it off with a clean rag to stimulate blood flow. Oddly, the sheep didn’t seem very interested in the lamb, which was good-sized. I assumed that she was tired (she’d been in labor for four hours), and offered her some grain. She nibbled a bit, and ignored the rest. The first two lambs were still sluggish and made no effort to suck when I fed them from the syringe.
I checked back on the sheep a few hours later to see if she’d delivered a placenta. She hadn’t, but again, there was a single hoof protruding from her birth canal. It was the same presentation as the second lamb. Again, I reached inside, allowed my hand to follow the neck back to the shoulder, press down, slide fingers down until I can hook the leg, and pull it out to the correct position. After the lamb was born, I wiped its nose, rubbed it dry with another clean rag, and milked the ewe to get some colostrum. All three lambs got some colostrum, but none of them seemed to want to suck when I fed them. The ewe was exhausted from the long labor, and as is often the case under that circumstance, she wasn’t actively claiming the lambs.
I had to be gone all day the next day, so my husband took over milking the ewes and feeding the lambs. But by the end of the day, four of the five lambs were dead. What went wrong, and what could we have done differently?
The answer appears to be selenium deficiency. Selenium deficiency is characterized by neural deficits, including lack of an urge to suck in newborn lambs. We had never had this problem before, but we changed our hay supplier. The hay looks and smells wonderful, much better quality than what we used to get, but apparently it doesn’t have enough selenium. The solution is to provide the sheep with salt supplemented with trace minerals. We provided the sheep with salt blocks, as we always have, but not supplemented with trace minerals. When we bought some trace mineral salt and offered it to the sheep, they acted like they’d been without salt for months.
Could this have been avoided? Maybe, if we’d either had the hay assayed, or simply fed trace mineral salt from the start. Losing four beautiful lambs is a tough way to learn a lesson, but the cost/benefit analysis is that an assay would cost more than four lambs. The right answer seems to be that trace mineral salt should always be offered.
If you raise sheep or are thinking about it, I hope that these three cases will be helpful to you. The last one is the most likely one that you’d face. That being said, sometimes uncommon stuff happens. When it does, do the best you can. Reach out to someone else, if possible. When you can figure out what the problem is, and there’s a workable solution, that’s as good as it gets.