Our ewe stared at the little creature that was hobbling towards her. Clearly, she was confused, not really understanding that this little baby was pulled out of her flank shortly beforehand. Anytime he approached from the front she would start shoving her baby around with her head. But after a few hours, she got acclimated to him and actually allowed him to nurse whenever he wanted.
Now that we have performed our sheep c-section lab, we have to make sure that our patients are okay. Besides the health of the ewe and her surgical incision, our biggest goal is to make sure that ewe and the lamb start bonding together. Luckily, ours didn’t take long to become a pair. Everything seemed to go really well, besides the fact that our ewe really didn’t like getting temped or being touched by people.
My lamb only had one problem during my time with him. He really loved his milk from mom, but his gastrointestinal system didn’t agree with him. So for 3 days, he had very smelly diarrhea that would stick to his tail and legs, then harden to his hair. Needless to say, I’ve become quite good at giving him a bath. My teacher even said that I had to get a picture of this so that I could show my future wife how good of a dad I would be.
The past 4 days was a lot of work but more importantly it was a great learning experience. We’ve been sitting in the classroom for years but now we finally got to have a couple of live patients to take care of. Since we were all looking forward to this day, one of my friends wore a special shirt for the occasion. It was a t-shirt that with a picture of a lamb and the words “Lamb Daddy” written on it. After leaving the barn, that is exactly how we all felt so the day couldn’t have gone any better.
