Good morning and a happy Easter weekend from a dry and cool Wiltshire. Grandmajet, can I add my support and best wishes along with everyone else’s? I sure that with your family and doctor behind you, you will make the right decisions. Ashcombe- it must be so frustrating to not be able to make plans to see your DH, or even have any idea when you will be allowed to.
Life on the farm continues to be busy. In my head, the period after lambing is always a quieter time, but in reality, it never is! What I didn’t say when I posted about jabbing and drenching the lambs on Wednesday is that we had a horrid, freak accident with one of the lambs. I didn’t mention it as I wasn’t at all sure that she’d pull through and thought I’d cast enough doom and gloom on my posts already with Pinchy’s sad demise. What happened was that, whilst running through the ‘race’ ( a series of gates and pens leading to a narrow corridor that allows us to have the lambs lines up to treat them) a lamb turned back and got his head caught in a narrow gap between the hinge end of a gate and the wall. As the other lambs pushed forward, the lambs head got crushed and (stop reading if you’re squimish) so hard that one of his eyes popped out of the eye socket. My DH had the quick reaction to push the eye back in but the poor little mite was in a bad way as the crushing of his head had obviously caused a huge trauma. I gave her a painkiller/ anti-inflammatory and antibiotic jab but really didn’t hold out a lot of hope for her as she was fitting intermittently and unable to stand. The good news is that Popeye (!) is steadily improving. Yesterday one of our fantastic vets came out and took some blood from another lamb, ‘spun’ the blood to extract the plasma, which he then dropped back onto the eyeball and stitched up the eyelids to allow the eye to heal. I have to remove the stitches on Wednesday. I can’t believe that, considering the thousands of lambs that have run through the race over the years, they still manage to find a novel way to injure themselves!
On a less positive note, Bogdon the bull is still not doing well, despite the treatments he has had. We have agreed to give him till Tuesday before we have to make a decision about what to do next. I think, and the vet agrees, that there is more going on with him than just the foot infection. It’s a bit of a disaster really that we could have done without- poor old chap.
I’m attaching a photo of Popeye and a jolly one of the lambs playing ‘king of the castle’ yesterday!
Wishing you all a jolly Saturday and to those of you lucky enough to be spending time with friends and family- enjoy.
