Win some, Lose some

Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.

We lost 109 Daron today. She went into labor and I couldn't get the lamb out. It felt weird. I talked to the vet about options, a C-section would be a minimum of $300 if there were no complications but more realistically $500+. It's not economically viable to spend that much money on a 9 year old ewe. I had several options, none good. I tried and tried but I could not shift the lamb, positively identify the parts I was feeling as belonged to the same lamb or have any hope of getting those parts out. We worked for quite a while but Daron went into shock and was losing blood. Per vet instructions we shot her and then I quickly cut her open in hopes we had a live lamb behind the mess I was feeling.

The deformed lamb weighed 31 pounds. Daron was perhaps 75 on a good day. There was no way to have gotten that mass out without a C-section and it was dead a while ago. There was no live lamb behind that one.

But while we were dealing with this disaster 322 Gwenda successfully lambed a set of twins, a ram and a ewe. She had them out, up, dry and nursed before we were done with Daron. Gwenda's lambs are doing fine in spite of our horrendous winds.

We are expecting snow tonight and tomorrow so we loaded six bales of hay into the pasture both as extra food for the ewes and shelter for the lambs. We have two ewes looking close but I think they will wait until tomorrow.