[shrekfeet]

any advice? I have a ewe with bad feet. Have never had to deal with this before. There are big gaps between the hoof and the soft tissue of the foot. I am trimming it back regularly to try to eliminate the gaps, I am scraping all thr crap out of it and also dunking her feet in to warm water with tea tree oil which I hear is a great antibactiraial/fungal. I am also spraying with blue teramicin spray. What else should I be doing and how far back should I trim? Can I cut out all the rotten soft tissue?

There's always bloody something!!!!!!!!!

[suziequeue]

I think if you're at the "rotten soft tissue" phase then - if it was me - I would be calling the vet.

I would trim cautiously but keep the hoof clean as you are doing and get a proper diagnosis. Sounds like she is likely to need antibiotic injections for this.

[Pedwardine]

I'd definately start with injectable antibiotics if I were you. Make sure no nasty trimmings get onto the paddock as best as you can. You'll get other cases before you know it. Probably worth checking other ewes now before it gets a bigger problem.

[Small Farmer]

Some sheep have bad feet and the only real solution is not to breed from them.  Our vet advises that foot trimming should be limited and done with great care because it can let infection in and stimulate faster foot growth.  This sounds like a case for the vet.

[robert waddell]

dip or spray the foot with formaldehyde (SPELLING) you can also get footvax    ours had no problem till October last year then every one went lame and lambs as well in Jan/Feb       just the constant wet weather

[SteveHants]

Aye, clean it up/spray, jag it with footvax, sell it as a cull when it gets better/has raised its lambs. The last thing you want in your flock is carriers of footrot.

[Fleecewife]

If it's bad give long acting Terramycin injection every 3 days until you see an improvement (up to about 3 injections), and dip the foot in Golden Hoof - it's great.  But if you feel you are getting on top of the problem then just give it time.  Check the foot once a week, but don't keep trimming back and fiddling with it - use Golden hoof again if you need to. What you might find is that muck has been shoved right up between the hoof and the foot and until that is removed the foot cannot heal, except with the use of an antibiotic injection.

Small farmer is correct that some sheep do have a greater tendency to have foot problems than others and that it can be hereditary.  However, here we allow the sheep a dose of footrot if she gets it then we see how she responds to treatment.  Usually it heals up after one treatment, but sometimes it comes back again and again - those ewes we wouldn't breed from - or a tup either.  As we also use fleece, we wouldn't necessarily cull the ewe, but we do have one Shetland with a tendency to bad feet who we have kept for her fleece but we keep her away from the main flock, with just a couple of chums, so she doesn't pass the rot onto the rest of the flock.  Most of the time she is fine, but her feet need more care than the others.

[Pasture Farm]

I have two Ewes in the barn at the moment both are as you described. They have had injections and are slowly mending but as soon as the limps go their off to market as cull.
I no longer keep any ewe that has persistant feet problems.

[Anke]

Are you meaning foot rot ( does it stink?) or is it a bad case of shelly hoof? Not much use with anitbiotics if shelly hoof. The bad weather/wet ground has caused all sorts of foot problems for me this year, from a ewe with strawberry foot rot, to persistent shelly hoof and of course white line abcess (following on from shelly hoof...) BUT only one or two with actual foot rot (as in starts at the heel and looks all pussy and smells).

Quite a bit of scald - that would benefit from terramycin or engemycin spray.

[Maggie]

I tend to agree with Small Farmer about limiting foot trimming.  Since my husband more regularly trims our Wiltshire Horns  they definitly grow faster, so it makes sense to limit it.  He's always muttering they have foot rot, but again, there's never a smell, it's just dirt plus the wet ground doesn't help.  Has anyone tried those impregnated foot mats which are supposed to do the job of *Golden Hoof*? 

[chrismahon]

Remembering back to our first lambs they developed foot rot immediately. Which means they arrived with it. I understood that it was in the ground and lay dormant until the ground got wet. So we set that area aside for 6 months and never had another case. We cut the nails back and scraped out the small rotten areas and sprayed liberally with the blue 'foot rot' stuff. Went away and didn't return.

[Haylo-peapod]

Re-iterating what others have said before, are you sure it is footrot?

Our sheep are prone to the mud getting between the soft tissue and the hoof making sections of the hoof 'blow'.
We tend to pare the hoof right back so that the mud no longer gets stuck and then spray with Linco Spectin. Before we started using LS, the soft tissue would go very mulchy but since we have been using it the sheeps feet seem more 'solid', despite the odd blown hoof. 

Linco Spectin is not an 'approved' sheep medication - it's more for poultry - but it works wonders. It's expensive (around £80 to £90 for a small tub), but it lasts forever. We put around 1 tsp of powder into a spray bottle and always have it on hand if we need to attend to feet.

[dixie]

I use to worry so much about their feet, I now trim them twice a year, once at lambing and one in the autumn. If they go lame in between, i trim if needed and spray with foot spray. Personally I find the more you trim the  more problems you get. I read an interesting article online from a university who'd done much research and found that most problems right themselves. always check obviously if there's a problem, trim any overgrowth or rotten hoof, spray and they sort it within a day usually.

[suziequeue]

Yes - we had a talk from the local sheep vet at the weekend who suggested that trimming should be minimised minimised minimised.

[SteveHants]

I use to worry so much about their feet, I now trim them twice a year, once at lambing and one in the autumn. If they go lame in between, i trim if needed and spray with foot spray. Personally I find the more you trim the  more problems you get. I read an interesting article online from a university who'd done much research and found that most problems right themselves. always check obviously if there's a problem, trim any overgrowth or rotten hoof, spray and they sort it within a day usually.

Most do seem to. I don't routinely trim at all, I only trim if a sheep goes lame.