Once we splinted his leg, baby Baa pretty much never looked back. He received an antibiotic shot as a just in case measure and very quickly got the hang of walking on three legs. It took a few adjustments but we managed to splint and bandage his leg from above the elbow to his fetlock joint, as there was some swelling below the bandage with the shorter splint.
I stopped it short of the ground because he wee’d on the first one that we did that was down to the ground. Initially we used pvc pipe and plastic as a splint then change to carpet and pvc pipe as he got bigger.
The amazing thing was that he was not in any obvious pain he only flinched the first couple of times that we re-splint him, then was up exploring straight away. We kept him inside at night for the first two weeks, but after the first few days we were able to put him out with his mum during the day. By about two weeks of age he started to leave him out overnight with no problems.
We have had five other lambs born since then, and we got a crash course in sheep midwifery when one of our ewes stopped progressing with the lambs head and foot hanging out of her. After getting all the sheep in the yards and finally drafting them all out, we were able to get hold of her – after dark, freezing cold and raining but I doubted she would survive the night with a dead lamb hanging out of her and it would take the vet to long to get here.
The lambs head was stone cold and the tongue was hanging out, blue and swollen. I couldn’t pull the head or leg out any further, and had awful visions of pulling the head off and the ewes uterus coming out with it. So I pushed the leg that was sticking out gently back in, took a deep breath and went in looking for the other leg to re-position them (never would have thought it possible to have two hands inside a sheep!)
That was when I felt the lambs chest heave and realized he was still alive! Long story short, he was initially too weak to drink so we got him a few drinks of colustrum by hand milking the ewe over the first 24 hours, but then his mum refused to feed him, so we raised him inside for a few days (he bonded exceptionally well with G who spent the first night sleeping in the loungeroom with Star asleep beside him). On the fourth or fifth day we gave it one last shot with constraining the ewe so that Star could feed and she finally accepted him drinking again so we couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.
