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Lilka continues to try to eat, but she just isn’t consistently eating enough roughage. It is a difficult in-between time; she is too well to tolerate spending the day in her pen when the others are outside. Besides fretting and stressing herself, she is strong enough now to jump out and has tried almost successfully. I am still giving her thiamine and B-vitamins, and feeding her twice a day, helping her get enough hay into her mouth. I am also still giving her gruel made with oatmeal and the rumen/bloat remedy recipe  that Linda Doane gave me years ago. In case it will be useful to someone else with an ill sheep, I will put the recipe at the end of this post.

I am also giving her huge amounts of probiotics before she goes out in the morning and after she comes in and at bedtime, but I feel that there isn’t enough roughage going in all day to support the bacteria. Our USDA vet (who always is interested in talking sheep physiology with me) told me once that the 1/2 life of the rumen bacteria without nutritional support is 30 minutes! (just to be clear….every thirty minutes 1/2 of the bacterial culture dies if there isn’t enough material in the rumen for it to thrive on.)

This was a big ah-ha moment for me to say the least…I began to see the sheep as a walking bacterial culture. The rumen bacteria are not only necessary to break down their feed into useable nutrients, but to synthesize many of the vitamins (most particularly thiamine) that the sheep absolutely must have in order to survive. If the rumen is unhealthy, and it isn’t attended to, the sheep will die.

So I have developed a working relationship with Lilka’s rumen….and believe that I can stubbornly sustain her life until it finally kicks in. Please let today be the day that she keeps her mouth full just like this!

PS: Three hours later, now 10:00 AM….Lilka is lying in the sun chewing her cud!!!!

Rumen/Bloat Remedy…thanks to Linda Doane.

1 qt. warm water

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking soda

1/4 cup Karo syrup

1/2 cup corn oil

1 raw egg

1/2 cup yogurt (or more)

Lilka was born last spring and from the beginning it was obvious that she would stay on here at Stonehaven Farm. Everything about her was beautiful to my shepherd’seye…she is a katmoget (light badgerface genetics) with a perfect little body,  a big soft lustrous fleece with the long single coat that we have been breeding for….and beyond that, her impish personality completely captured my heart.

We almost lost Lilka this week to polioencephalomalacia…presumably from stress related to shearing a few days before. We were unaware of any problems until we found her having seizures last Sunday afternoon; she has been in “intensive care” ever since. An hour or so after giving her B-vitamins fortified with thiamine, CMPK sub-Q and some Banamine, she was once again able to stand….but still blind and confused. As soon as she was able to swallow, she got doses of probiotic to restore her ailing rumen.

Since Monday, Lilka has been looking like a well sheep in all regards except one. She hasn’t been able to eat or drink by herself. She has been given our rumen remedy, oral CMPK and copious amounts of probiotic several times a day…all keeping her alive, but somehow the flora in her rumen hadn’t been able multiply to numbers that would sustain her.

In addition to all this, as soon as she was able to deal with it, I began feeding her small amounts of hay by putting it into the side of her mouth…and although I have been careful to give her only a little at a time, she has chewed and swallowed very well; just couldn’t pick it up on her own. But she was obviously hungry for it…lately sniffing me and nudging me a bit when I was in the pen with her.

For the past three days, with sunny warm(ish) temperatures, it seemed better to let her out of her little pen in the barn so that she could feel like a “sheep” and could be as stress free as possible. So in the mornings, she got her meds and probiotic and was topped up with the rumen remedy and gruel before she went out with the others.

Each day, she has stood watching the other sheep, and going from hay pile to hay pile feeling that she ought to do something, but was unsure how to go about it. But TODAY (tah-dah!) she ate a little with the others…not terribly efficiently, but she managed to get her mouth around the hay for the first time.

We won’t stop giving her the rumen support and vitamins, but I feel sure that our dear little Lilka will recover, and will grace our farm for years to come.