It's been some time since I posted last. A lot has happened but I don't think I could relay even half of it.
First, my pregnancy continues. Not much time left before our new arrival gets here!
We purchased some Tunis ram lambs... well they were banded when I picked them up. I didn't like donut banders before but now I can detest them with a passion. The lambs scrotum just barely fit. So here's my best guess. Banded + scrotum falls off prematurely + raw wound gets infected + rotten flesh + maggots set in eating away everything including live tissue + fly strike sets in + septic infection = death. Lost 3 of 6 lambs before getting it somewhat under control.
To start I went out and cleaned the wound with tea tree and lavender essential oils and scraped the maggots out which required tea tree oil application so they wouldn't just crawl back in again. The tea tree oil kills the little buggers. The lavender oil was applied at the end to promote healing among other things. I've been using a 1% tea tree/water solution (20 drops tea tree to 100mL water) to spray on the fly strike. Tea tree oil is apparently a natural insecticide. Then I also started limit feeding Fertrell's Rumicult 40 Gold. *gasp* It has copper in it! Don't care! Fescue pasture = copper deficiency. They've reduced how much they eat on their own now, but I still limit how much they get. So the results of this treatment still equated to two dead lambs. ACK! What finally turned it around was the homeopathic remedy Lachesis 30x. The maggot infestation in the raw wounds reduced after 24 hrs. The Lachesis is used for treatment of gangrene in traumatic wounds as well as septic infection. After 48 hrs, the maggots in the wound nearly nonexistent and healing had started. Still continued to put tea tree and lavender oils on the wounds to help as well. The two lambs in worse condition were showing severe weakness in the back legs so I dosed them with Conium 30c. Only took once, as they were showing improvement in a few hours. I'm down to battling fly strike on two of them and just putting the essential oils on the wounds. The third I caught early enough that he didn't progress to fly strike buy real improvement didn't show until homeopathic treatment started.
We don't do antibiotics. And vets do antibiotics.
I almost won a battle with Coliform mastitis in a ewe with similar treatments but I didn't protect myself properly and got pretty sick for a few days. She regressed and died. She was healing up but discovered it was her water source that was contaminated so she couldn't win. If her water hadn't been contaminated then I believe I had gotten her far enough she would've healed up but I'm conjecturing. Homeopathic treatment doesn't work if you don't remedy the outside cause.
So that's my wonderful gross story for the day.. we'll see how the fly strike goes now.
