>>> Message: 4 Michael: I have 85 ewes due to start lambing April 5. I can only offer a few words of advice for your next lambing. Leave the lamb on MAMA as long as possible. If she kicks the lamb off for a good reason (no milk) then let her raise them and supplement with a bottle. Humans cannot replace the natural mothering. If you want them to be pets then play with the lambs and feed Mama by hand whenever you visit the lambs to play. Miniature candy bars will win Mama over quickly. The lambs will get friendly. I also have left the lambs on Mama when she had nearly no milk but supplemented the lamb with a bottle of milk replacer. I supplemented 3 rams last winter while they were on the ewe and I have 3 of the biggest pets ever seen!!!
Just my $.02 Cecil in OKla >>> Cecil, I totally agree with this tactic, especially after our first experience. But, Bam Bam required supplementation after just a week. He was already getting constipated and not gaining weight, and losing temp. In his case, I think he might have been doomed either way, or perhaps died sooner, if I left him out in a pasture with his mom, especially with the freezing mornings we would unexpectedly get. I can tell you though, that the reasoning for trying this so early was: Our ewes are so wild, they will dash their necks into the fencing (or try to leap and take out my head) trying to get away from us even if we approach slowly, even though, in a pasture, I can feed these ewes by hand (but they are still very wary). I can never pet them or even grab them, no matter how I bribe them with food. Have not tried candy bars yet. And I will, in case sugar really does make them more reasonable :-) The bottle-lambs reflect this, in that they still mostly (not always) dash away from me if I try to reach down and pick one up "unless they are hungry". When hungry, they totally don't care and climb on me and are plenty friendly. In general, they chase me around the pasture and climb our big fallen log with me....but are still wary of humans. Being able to pick them up and touch them when hungry is a definite improvement over their mothers, though. I get the feeling they were taught this "flight tendency" in their first week, by their mothers, running away from us, in the lambing paddocks and leading their lambs on a high-speed circular chase as we tried to inspect the lambs (nearly trampling and killing their own offspring). I wanted to stop the parent's influence on this behavior as soon as I thought it was safe to pull them. And to prevent the mothers from killing their lambs just to try to evade us. If we have any more lambs I want the next-year's lambing to be with the more tame bottle babies, so they won't teach their lambs to run from us right off the bat. In that case, then yes, I would allow them to be raised entirely by their mothers, and we might supplement some bottle feeding and lots of handling, to get them to bond, as you have done. I don't really need them to be pets, I just need them to not try to break their or my neck. There's still the question of how to handle the last pregnant ewe. She's the single wildest one I have. I had a local AB breeder mention her pal was raising AB lambs by bottle and they are "friendly and loving and always want to be picked up". I asked how the mothers were, and they were generally rather tame barn animals, unlike my ewes. -Michael, Perino Ranch Blackbellies _______________________________________________ This message is from the Blackbelly mailing list Visit the list's homepage at %http://www.blackbellysheep.info
