It's not been a great week as far as the stock is concerned. A bit of a disaster in fact, as I've lost some fat lambs to pasturella.
I am a lucky guy in most things in life but not when it comes to sheep.
If there's another way for one of my flock to die that I haven't seen yet then I should know it's only a matter of time.
I vaccinated my lambs earlier in the year against many of the things that can get them as they're growing, one of the things they were meant to be vaccinated again was pasturella but obviously it isn't 100% successful, as I can prove.
Taken from google:
"Pasteurella pneumonia is considered one of the most important infectious bacterial diseases of sheep. It is usually caused by Pasteurella haemolytica, a bacteria that is a normal inhabitant of the upper respiratory tract of the sheep."
The main trouble with it is how fast the animals go downhill, I was talking to another Shepard and he said that after a cool evening we had the other night he found 7 dead the next morning and a friend of his found 10 dead in one field. It can happen over night and as I check my animals twice a day it's hard for me to accept that a healthy animal can just die like that.
I managed to save one with a course of antibiotics as I caught it early enough but a few more have not been so lucky, the worst is I had been planning on selling them as store lambs a few weeks ago but I'd been working on the extensions so much I hadn't got round to it. As they had plenty of grass and they all seemed healthy I wasn't in too much of a rush.
But, like with all things, I try to keep a positive outlook, but the sheep do make it hard for me sometimes.
On a slightly crazy note when I've been dealing with these lambs this stupid song has been going through my head, only with the lyrics changed ever so slightly.
