[Foobar]

No, not allergies to sheep ...


I have a ewe that gets dry cracked areas of skin her ears, and sometimes under her belly. And they are itchy as she rubs them.  This seems to be a reaction to something that she's eaten.  I moved them into a fresh field on Sunday, so they've only been in there 3 days now and already she's broken out in crusty bits.  She also has some wool missing from the tip of her tail today.  She has obviously got a taste for whatever it is, as none of the other sheep get affected, or if they do its just a teeny bit on an ear.  It's odd that she gets sore under her belly though - maybe it's not to do with something she's eaten but maybe something she's rubbed against or sat on?


Trouble is, that field is full of all sorts of plants, including some orchids, so I'm going to have to get my identification books out and make a list of everything I can find.  It's gonna be a long list!  I've not had it happen this early in the year before so that might help me to narrow down the culprit as not everything has sprouted yet.


The reason for my post ... apart from St John's Wort and bracken (this hasn't started sprouting yet anyway), can anyone suggest any other plants that might cause these symptoms.  To give me an idea of what I'm looking for .
The field is what you might call a hay meadow, not been fertilised for years, other than sheep or horse dung.  It has a stream running across the bottom of it and a pond, so the bottom area is a bit boggy in places and there are some thin reed patches.  And it's in lowland south wales.


Any suggestions gratefully received!


(I will be moving the affected sheep somewhere else now, obviously!)

[zwartbles]

Mite be mites! or lice.

[Marches Farmer]

Or scab.  Take a skin scraping to your local vet.  Also suggest penning her away from the others just in case. Scab in particular spreads like wildfire.

[Foobar]

It's not scab mites, as they have all been Cydectin LA'd at the end of Feb.  Are there other sorts of sheep mites?


And it doesn't spread sheep to sheep, as just she had it last year too.

[Foobar]

Oh we have a LOT of midges around at the mo...so that is also a possibility.

[SallyintNorth]

Pound to a penny you have bog asphodel on ground like that.

It causes photosensitisation in sheep, usually lambs which can't resist it, which results in dry cracked scabby ears and other areas.  Normally adult sheep are aware of the problems and avoid the plant, but maybe your girl has an addiction even though she knows it's bad for her.

Otherwise, yes there are beasties which can cause itching which cydectin will not protect against - chewing lice is one - but normally these are fairly contagious and you'd expect to see symptoms in other members of the flock too.  You could give her a precautionary treatment of crovect - use the nozzle which delivers a thin line, not a spray; part the wool on her back and squirt the product directly onto the skin.  (Ask me how I know!)

[Foobar]

Okay, that's useful .. I will go on the hunt for that .


And, go on, how do you know?

[SallyintNorth]

Because when we moved to the moorland farm, we had some very itchy and miserable hoggs that first winter.

We ended up spending Christmas Day gathering them in from the furthest region of the farm, in filthy weather with 20 metre visibility, and Dectomaxing them.  The vet only had a humungous container of it, and being Christmas Eve when we were trying to locate some, we had no choice, we felt, but to get the one they had rather than make the poor sheepies suffer until 28th when we would have been able to buy a smaller, cheaper size.

A couple of weeks later is when we got the lesson about chewing lice and suckling lice.  Dectomax does sucking lice.  I wonder if you can guess which ones the poor sheepies had. 

So then we crovected them (and had the lesson in using the pointy nozzle, and parting the fleece so you squirt it in a line onto bare skin) - and they never looked back. 

(Yes, we had tried to get a sample to the vet for analysis before spending a couple of hundred quid on a lifetime's supply of Dectomax  but apparently we hadn't managed to collect any of the beasties with the scraping.  When we had the vet out to them when they weren't improved, he did his own scrape and they were able to see the biting lice under the microscope.  Lesson learned - vet callout fees are sometimes really good value )

Thinking back on it all now, I recall that we were surprised at the time that we didn't initially seem to have much of a biting lice problem in the rest of the flock.  By the time we got a diagnosis and the correct treatment, we did have some itchers in other parts of the flock.

We later learned that we hadn't done our hoggs too well that first winter; we hadn't realised they'd need caking through the winter, being southerners and assuming that Swaledales would be hardy thrifty animals.  (They are, but the conditions on that farm are fairly severe.)  So then, being a little low anyway, they'd succumbed to the biting lice that lived on the farm and enabled the lice to do well enough to then begin to infest the rest of the flock.

For the next couple of years we treated the keeping lambs with crovect for biting lice in the back end (I mean in the autumn, not we treated only the sheeps' bottoms  ), and after that we didn't have the problem again.

So if it is biting lice, and it's only that one ewe badly affected, I'd be wondering whether she has an underlying other problem that makes her susceptible.  Could be worth giving her a mineral drench to correct any mineral or vitamin deficiencies?  (As well as treating the lice, I mean.)

[Foobar]

Haha, oh poor you.  That's all very useful to know anyway.


As for mineral deficiencies etc, they were all dosed pre-lambing. She is 6 now, and thinner than the others, but mainly i think cos she puts her all into producing milk for her babies, as she usually produces fabulous lambs.  They are also all up to date with fluke treatments.


I will give the crovect a try and also see what plants I can find in the undergrowth ...   Thanks!

[SallyintNorth]

Bog asphodel is more likely to be in the open.  It likes it wet.  On the moorland farm it loved growing in the places where we rode the quad bike; the sphagnum got squashed and there was more water collected in the lines where the tyres went.