| | As many have reminded me it has been ages since I wrote a blog of my adventures in Vet School. That is true. The neglected is not intended, but more a function of exhaustion. An exhaustion on all levels ?physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, transcendental...
For months I have been in a race for time to learn, do, master, and overcome. I think I getting there. I hope.
Rewind to April ?Spring Break for many college students. Lambing and exam study time for Royal Dick Vet Students. In the UK, most exams are given at the end of the year. One big cumulative exam worth 80-90% of your mark. All exams occur during the month of May, so typically all of April is given off for revision. They call it revision because the assumption is that you have been religious about studying the material all year long, which might be the case if there were 48 hours in a day.
Since my program is the 2 for the price of 1 program ?Two years of study for one tuition price ?wee been doing double time with everything. This means that April was not just study, study, study. It was Lambing, study, study, lambing, study.
What is this lambing thing I speak of? When did a ee beastie?become a verb? And if it is a proper verb, what are we doing to the poor things????
Lambing is the time of year when all the little lambs are born. Cute and wobbly on their new found legs. Wide eyed, bushy tailed and clamoring for mothers milk. Stuck and twisted in the backside of a ewe. I sorry was that a bit graphic? Youe lucky Ie spa red you the visuals in my photo album.
Lambing was great fun. I spent three weeks on a proper English farm in Oxfordshire and by some stroke of amazing luck it was WARM and DRY and BRIGHT with sun shining all day long (not just for 5 hours in the middle of my lectures). It was a little piece of heaven. The first week I wandered the fields checking to see if any of the ewes were in labor or had given birth. Then there was the preparation of the sheepy maternity ward, making dozens of pens filled with soft straw, fitted with water and feed bowls and tasty flakes of hay. No, I didn try the hay, but it did smell fresh and sweet. In evenings I would pull out my notes on animal nutrition and the phrase umen digestible nitrogen?finally made sense, because when we first received the nutrition lectures we hadn had ruminant digestion. I did have a clue what a rumen was! I always knew in laymen terms that a cow had four stomachs, but I didn know that they each had their own name and functions.
I sure that those of you reading this who thought I might someday treat your pet, free of charge, are having second thoughts about that. Just remember, I still have 3 more years to figure out what I doing and at the current learning curve that means A LOT!
Week two of lambing: There are 320 ewes, each is marked with a different color of spray paint. Blue means she having one lamb, green means twins, red mean three or more. There are pros and cons to too many or too few lambs. Singles tend to be big and like to get stuck during birth. Triplets or quadruplets tend to be tiny, have a difficult time surviving and the mother can always produce enough milk for all of them. The ideal number is two ?two of equal size. However, nature has a sense of humor and although most of our ewes are painted green, it best not to take anything for granted.
It is a Monday and things have been busy yet relaxed up to now. I wandering through the field of happy sunning ewes when I notice something a bit odd. One ewe, separated from the group has two heads. One big one in the front and a little one in the back. This is a bad sign. When the head comes out without the legs our woolly mama needs help. I walk towards her, she walks away, I stop and slowly edge towards her, again she walks away. I run at her full speed, which isn all that fast considering I wearing wellies, she takes off a break neck speed. All I can see if the little lambs head bouncing behind and I wonder if I be able to run that fast while giving birth? The idea behind chasing her is to A) Catch her, B) flip her onto her side, C) hold her down with one arm, while D) manipulating the lamb inside her so that it can fit through the birth canal. This is a time sensitive procedure because once the placenta is broken the lamb needs to breath on it own.
On that first day I used my cell phone to call for back up. Antony, a fit 18-year old farm hand, performed the capture and hold, while Robert, the farmer, showed me the ins and outs of removing a stuck lamb. 300 ewes and three weeks later I was downing and pulling on my own. If you woulde told me that would happen in the beginning I would not have believed you.
The maternity ward I helped build was teeming with mommies and babies by the end of my stay. Being that this farm was started in the 1950 much of the processes were from that era as well. Water, feed and hay was hand carried to each pen. Fresh straw was placed in the pens twice a day to keep the newborns clean, dry and warm and any lamb that looked a hungry or unwell was tube fed 3-4 times a day. Ewes are quite head strong and can be rather demanding at times. On a few occasions I arrive in the morning and begin the feeding routine. A handful of the ewes would stand with their front hooves on the top of the pens tapping a hoof every now and again, as if to say, ervice! Service! Can I get some service here!?I was quickly reduced from a trained medical person to diner waitress in the tap of a hoof. The kicker was that I if I wasn quick enough for their taste they would leap the side of the pen and dig into the bag of feed on their own. In my stubbornness I would leave these rude customers for last, that is until the morning when five ewes leapt out of their pens and charged the feed bag. The challenge wasn getting them back into their pens, it was figuring out which mother matched the pen with her lambs. A mismatch could mean rejection of the lambs and they would go hungry. Too long a separation from the correct lambs would mean the ewe would forget her own children altogether. I won say that sheep fit the typical umb?stereo-type, but I almost won be recommending them to Mensa any time soon.
Il let you do the math here ?300 ewes * average 2 lambs/ewe * hot day (lots of water) * tube feeding 3-4x/day. That easily takes up 14-16 hours per day and then there still that studying thing <sigh>. The next time you think, TGIF, just remember that for farmers and Vet students a Friday is the same as a Monday.
Don think I didn get away with bring a little lamb home, because I did. Her name is ittle Black Lamb?and she was the cutest little thing when she was born. Unfortunately, her evil mother didn think so. She was one of two and although LBL was born first the ewe decided that she wasn hers. The ewe adored the second spotted lamb and showered her with attention, but every time LBL tried to feed the ewe would head-butt her into the side of the pen. LBL never gave up. She tried snuggling up against the ewe to keep warm at night and the ewe would push her away. The sad irony is that the ewe eventually ended up sitting on the spotted lamb and all her milk dried up, leaving LBL without a mom. Well, except for me. Four times a day I would feed LBL from a bottle and cradle her like a baby. She loved it! Most lambs aren too keen on being held, but LBL got to the point where she would take a running leap into my arms when I approached her pen. She immediately try and suckle my ear lobe, finger, anything she could. When she was big enough I would pull her out of her pen and let her follow me around the yard as I did my chores. She loved playing games with Jarrocks, the farmers Jack Russell Terrier. Eventually, a ewe gave birth to a large single, one the same size as my 2 weeks old orphan lamb, and we gave LBL to her as a foster child. It took a few days, but LBL learned how to suckle again and bonded with her foster-sister. It was a huge relief to see her cuddled up with another lamb at night and growing faster on mothers milk than she ever did on milk powder.
Robert still sends me emails and calls to give me updates on LBL. Her growth is a bit stunted, but she is the most social of all the lambs. Getting a bit too big though to jump up in my arms.
Upcoming blog installments:
- Animal Handling Exams ?everything you never wanted to know about a gerbil
- What UK exams have done to me
- Pigs and Chickens and Cages, Oh my!
- Heaven is a horse farm
- Settling into the new flat
- What summer holds for Cynthia
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| | Posted 7/4/2007 7:21 AM - 63 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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