The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Sheep => Topic started by: shep53 on March 19, 2017, 07:57:01 pm
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Just to show their is no typical type of ewe that will prolapse . 15days before lambing this years first prolapse ( small in and out ) young ewe had 1 lamb carrying a single , no problems lambing last year . CS 3 so not fat ,out side so plenty of exercise . Texel x ewe carrying a lamb to a hill ram so should be slightly smaller . Feeding is any grass /silage / and 150gms of nuts . My records show most of my prolapses are CS 2.5 and as many singles as triplets and 1crops account for most . My earliest prolapse was in late January and the latest the day before lambing
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I've had a ewe prolapse today. Melon sized prolapse, 4 weeks off lambing, ewe not fat at all and scanned single. Oh and grass only fed, no hay and no corn! I was amazed ( and slightly annoyed)
The joys
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My mild prolapse ewe this year isn't too fat, been out until 2 weeks before lambing on minimal cake. But her twin lambs were large which kind of makes sense. She's going after weaning though nonetheless.
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I have mentioned before that some research was done that indicated an inability to utilise calcium in the diet may contribute to prolapse. We experimented one year by keeping a prolapsed ewe and injecting her with 5ml of calcium every week for a month before she lambed. No prolapse but she was culled after weaning anyway as we didn't know if it was a heritable trait. That may be the case as we haven't seen a prolapse for about five years, although we have refined our feeding programme every year, too.
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Brian Hosie did the work in the 1980's and he suggested feeding a flour ( I think ) that was very high in calcium , and they ran a small trial but came to no concrete conclusion
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could it be because they may have picked up something/eaten something which could have irritated their backends at all? All this wet weather and so forth....
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More to do with muscle tone around the cervix and vulva ....?