The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: Paulie on April 23, 2015, 02:27:45 pm
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Hi, can anyone advise how much milk a 11 day old lamb should be having, he seems strong and healthy and now comes running for his bottle, I've been giving 6 feeds a day ( nothing at night as I work night shifts but this hasn't been a problem thus far. His intake has been gradually increasing and we are are at 200ml per feed, he would take more than that now but want to over do it.
Thanks
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Best to follow the manufacturers guidelines but normally they will say ad lib after 7 days old.
Which means you can use your ingenuity to rig up some way of holding the bottle, just keep it topped up and everyone's a winner.
Top tip...the black metal frame from a small household fire extinguisher is just the right size to hold a normal lamb bottle!
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I was fostering 4 orphan lambs and OH made me a rack to put the bottles in. It made life much easier.
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That's nifty Bionic :thumbsup:
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Does the lamb also have access to grass and/or hay? It will start to nibble at either around now.
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It should have access to creep by now, but not necessarily hay (they need to start off on creep as it's higher in nutritional value than hay, and they get full easily so need to fill themselves up with creep at that age). The bag of milk powder should have it all on. By 11 days our lambs if they are on a bottle will be on 5 maybe 4 feeds per day totalling 1litre of milk. If on a feeder they are ad lib.
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As others have said, make sure he has water and creep feed which needs refreshing at least once a day.
I've got 4 on one of the multi-feed buckets, they are really healthy lively lambs who "what to go" and have done since they were born but the ewe for three of them had zero milk for 48hr and not much after that. They are still on her as she mothers them really well (including the one that isn't hers which she just accepted).
They have been on twice a day feeding since they were three weeks old and are self limiting their intake to half a litre (average) per feed. They are eating grass and hay but not fussed with hard feed yet but I think I need to start feeding the ewe when they are not expecting the bucket.
I think you have to use your judgement a bit as to how robust you think the lamb is, you might need to feed more milk if it doesn't start taking the creep. You can offer him a bit of creep to play with in your hand to begin with.