Suddenly I feel I have to make some serious comments here. I have heard all your stories about buying orphan lambs and rearing them and now I discover you are paying such ridiculous amounts for them. Someone is laughing all the way to the bank and it isn't you
This is clearly something to do with an increase in the number of new smallholders who maybe just don't know that there is a better way to buy in stock. If orphan lambs are genuinely orphaned in that their dam has died, or even if they are a third triplet, they have not had a good or natural start in life - after such a start then at best they need an experienced stockman to care for them. Maybe you are just raising them for meat - but surely you want the healthiest meat to eat, not from an animal which has had antibiotics and been reared on artificial milk replacer and grain? And if you are going to be using these animals in the future as your breeding stock - well, all I can say is that I wouldn't recommend it. When you choose breeding stock you want the best you can buy - from healthy stock, ewes which will lamb without trouble and raise their own lambs, not from a dam which herself could not rear her lamb for whatever (hereditary) reason.
I suspect though that most of you who are buying in orphan lambs are doing so because of the cuddle factor - please just buy a rabbit
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And finally - with prices for orphans so high I can see a new trade where the breeder just takes the lambs straight off their dams and sells them on to the gullible.
I know what I have written will not go down well, but I have been very saddened this spring by what I have read on TAS about people's struggles with rearing orphan lambs