The Soay Sheep Chronicles

Does one of your sheep have a cloudy, bluish-looking eye, what you might call a “walleyed” look? Is the animal behaving as if it might not be able to see well or is bumping into things? If so, it probably has scratched its eyeball or gotten poked in the eye and injured its cornea. There likely is also gooey crud in the eye. If so, the injury has provoked a secondary infection.

Sheep generally do not injure their eyes in the summer and shoulder seasons when they graze freely on pasture grass without much jostling from their buddies and nothing sharp in their pastures to poke their eyes. But in the winter when they are eating hay out of feeders, the sheep stick their heads in and once in a while the hay (or the grit in the hay) scratches an eyeball. And not surprisingly so, since they are standing cheek-by-jowl with their buddies at the feeders, cramming their heads in and jockeying for the tastiest morsel deep within the flakes of hay. It is the winter equivalent of grass-greener-on-other-side-of-fence, but with occasional optical battle scars. You are not likely to have this happen to one of your Soay sheep, but if you do, here is what you can do about it.

First off, if left untreated, an injured eye may result in blindness. In fact, the first time this happened on our farm, we presumed the situation was hopeless because the animal’s eye looked so odd and the sheep was bumping into things as if blind. Thank goodness we consulted our veterinarian, because getting rid of the crusty stuff, and usually healing the cornea and restoring sight, is pretty straightforward. The cornea has a remarkable capacity to recover (think Lazik?). The vet examines the eye under a special light (UV or something similar). If I recall correctly, the vet prescribes antibiotic ointment called neo-poly-bac if there is a corneal injury and infection, and a different ointment (neo-poly-dex) if the cornea is not damaged and there is only an infection, but don’t hold me to these names, please. One of them includes a steroid, and that’s why determining the presence or absence of injury matters.

Whichever kind of antibiotic the vet prescribes, it comes in a little bitty tube. Application is easy once you get the hang of it and you certainly can do it yourself without multiple trips to the vet’s office. The goal is to lay a thin line across the sheep’s eyeball. I will do a EweTube demo of how to do this next week when we are catching sheep to disassemble our breeding groups, but for now, let’s just say the trick is to hold the animal’s head with the infected eye facing up – and open – and then squeeze out the ointment so it barely touches the eyeball. The heat of the eye will melt the ointment in a second or two, almost instantaneously. Do not try to rub it in or do anything with your finger; you will only rile up the sheep. After a few days of twice-daily applications, any infection (crud) will be gone and the sheep’s tears clear. Once the corneal surface has healed, the sheep will slough off the injured layer and in most cases the eye will be clear again and the sheep will see just fine.

As with all issues related to livestock, the decision whether to invest in a visit to the vet and the resulting prescriptions is entirely up to each shepherd. Eye injuries are very rare, and there is always a chance the eye will heal with just an over-the-counter ointment. For us, we will continue to treat any future eye injuries because we have a flock in which every animal has an important role in our conservation breeding program. We also have heard enough anecdotes about blind sheep to give us pause about introducing that kind of flock management issue – a completely blind or one-eyed animal trying to find its way. The problem would be particularly hard to deal with if the blind animal were a ram that the other rams would target as damaged and pick on him, or worse. But once you have seen a cloudy eye or two, you can do what we do – keep the partial tube of antibiotic in your refrigerator and go ahead and administer the antibiotic without another trip to the vet if it is hay-feeding season or you otherwise are pretty sure your animal’s cloudy eye is a hay scratch or other eye poke. For an unusually valuable single animal, we might take it to the vet or at least double-check with her over the phone about the particulars of how the eyeball looks to us.

Cruddy eyes in lambs. None of our Soay lambs have had a cloudy eye, thank goodness, but once in a while we have a lamb with cruddy eyes. The cause remains a mystery to us, but it seems to happen towards the end of lambing, perhaps because in the unavoidably wet late winter/early spring conditions here in Oregon, bacteria build up in the lambing area throughout April – who knows? What we do know is that a couple of applications of an over-the-counter antibiotic (tetracycline) ointment (our brand is called Terramycin), together with the sunshine and drier weather later in the spring, clears up the occasional crusty eye just fine and dandy.

Good grief. Surely I could have found a more pleasant topic for the holidays than “sleepy crumbs” or “fairy dust” or whatever you called it in your childhood. Oh well, happy new year from all the critters – human, ovine, canine, feline, and camelid – at Saltmarsh Ranch!

For now …

There is no more reliable way to start diagnosing a failing lamb, a sick Soay of any age, or shock from injury, than to take the animal’s temperature.  Almost without fail, if the temperature is normal, any listlessness, limping or other indication of a problem will be structural (e.g., rock in foot, temporary diarrhea caused by changing abruptly from hay to green grass) and not pathological.  An inexpensive digital thermometer is the shepherd’s best ally for quick diagnosis.

In our experience, a low newborn temperature always means the lamb has not yet nursed, plain and simple, either because it is taking its sweet time to get started or for some reason (pathological or structural) it is too weak.  The little lamb’s body is behaving as though it were in shock, marshalling all the lamb’s resources to stay warm.  In the last two years, we have had 13 newborn lambs (out of more than 150 Soay lambs born on our farm) with temperatures below 102, what the sheep experts would call “below normal,” during the lambs’ first 2-4 hours after birth.  Of those, only one died, a lamb that started at 99.3F and despite drenching and tube-fed colostrum, never had enough strength to nurse and died within ten hours.  We drenched two more of those “cool” lambs.  The remaining ten lambs each got up and nursed promptly enough that we did not feel the need to intervene.  All twelve are healthy and thriving.

Here’s one of my favorite fully-pedigreed British yearling ewes, Pateley, shown at age 12 months — in the center of this photograph — and looking none the worse for having started out chilly:

Regal and long-legged, Pateley began life quite large, but “shivering” (from my notes on her lambing card) and not very robust.  She had a temperature of only 101.2 about 10 hours after she was born in late April 2007.  We gave her a 2.5 cc dose of Nutradrench and then monitored her temperature — 101.5F an hour later and a reassuring 102.0 seven hours after that.  As I write this post in January 2009, Pateley is about to leave the breeding area she has been in for two months with Finsbay, an equally good-looking 2-year old British ram.  We have high hopes for their offspring!

The other lamb we drenched, Thirsk, had a scary temperature of only 100.6 four hours after he was born, at a time when he should have nursed and gotten his first colostrum.  That one drenching was all it took to get him jump-started.  Thirsk is in line to breed one of our British conservation groups of ewes in 2010.  This picture (Thirsk is on the left) was taken in December, when he was 20 months old, again having more than recovered from his slow start.  The green tape flopping off his right horn is part of a color-coded identification system we are trying out to allow us to observe and evaluate our rams without always having to catch them, but that’s another story for another post.

Once in a while a lamb will start out with a healthy temperature but then fail to “get it” in the nursing department, either because it is born slightly weak or just cannot figure out the nursing routine, with the result that the lamb’s temperature starts falling and it may need our intervention.  Let me give you an example:  one of our ram lambs this year started out just fine at 102.0 shortly after birth in early evening.  Here they are, mother Coda and baby Askham, about 15 minutes after he was born:

By the next morning, little Askham’s temperature had dropped to 99.4.  Thankfully, we had decided to check him because he was listless and just not behaving like the miniature gluttons we are accustomed to.  Steve immediately stripped his mother’s milk and tube fed him; his temperature returned to 102.4 in three hours, but he remained weak for the rest of the day and until late that night.  The morning of the third day, his temperature was fine, but he developed a crusted eye (often a sign of something else amiss), so we treated it with an ophthalmalic ointment.  When his temperature dropped during that third day to 101.5, we again stripped his mother’s milk and tube fed him.  By the fourth day, his temperature had dropped a little more, to 101.3, but his tummy felt full and he slowly regained strength.

The great news about Askham is that he turned it around and today is one of our most robust 2008 ram lambs.  Just a few more pictures tell the tale.

Here he is with mama Coda on April 11, 2008 at the age of 3 weeks.  His coat is full and clean, and although Coda looks pretty ratty from shedding her coat, she also is healthy and comfortably able to provide him with enough milk without herself becoming too thin or wasted.

A few weeks later, when Askham was just about two months old, he and his now-sleek mother posed together in the middle of this photograph to show off his continuing growth and emerging horns:

By December, the 2008 ram lamb crop had nearly finished their first rut as sexually mature rams (although still too small to try for alpha ram status against the older fellows) and Askham’s horns had grown enough to make him “competitive” with his 2008 buddies.  Here is his strutting his stuff in the bull pen, campaigning to be placed in the lineup to breed next year.  To this day we do not know what was ailing him those first few days or whether he would have made it on his own, but with his breeding potential we didn’t want to take the chance of losing him.

True to the legendary hardiness of Soay sheep, we have had only an occasional diseased or injured animal.  In each case, temperature was one of the clues that the problem was pathological, just as in humans — fever indicating inflammation or infection, or low temperature an indication of shock after injury.  When a sheep has appeared to be injured and we have taken its temperature, one of two situations obtained.  A normal temperature reassured us that the animal was not in shock and we could spend some time observing its behavior before deciding whether to seek professional assistance for broken bones or whatever.  An abnormally low temperature, on the other hand, has sent us to the vet immediately on two occasions, once for a little lamb in shock from being “played” with (an overly enthusiastic puppy simply licked and pawed the little lamb until it went into shock) and once for a ram who apparently had bashed too hard into another ram or a wooden fencepost, leaving him dazed and with what turned out to be a neck injury.

Thankfully, both of the injured animals came back to full health; these little guys really are hardy.  But if you are unfortunate enough to have an accident or sickness occur in your flock, you will have a good first indication of whether it is serious by the animal’s temperature.

For now …