It doesn’t look good,” said Wilf. He was looking at a six-month old Suffolk ram, standing in the corner of my sheep pen with his nose about two inches above the ground. “I don’t like to see them like that.”
Wilf Smalley is Petunia Valley’s premier sheep man. His family has been raising Suffolks and Cheviots up on Hall’s Hill for three generations now and he is the go-to guy for anybody who wants good, honest crossbred commercial meat sheep or advice on how to keep them alive. In my case, it was both. I had just bought a bunch of ewes and this purebred ram from him, and now the ram was suddenly sick.
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“It doesn’t look good,” Wilf repeated. My 12-year old daughter Fruit Loop sat on a bale behind us, and she too was staring at the ground. She had already formed a bond with the young ram and called him Max.
“So what do you think we’re looking at?” I asked.
“What you’re looking at there is a dead sheep, in my experience. It seems their strongest desire is to die before the cheque clears the bank.”
“Max was fine yesterday,” said Fruit Loop grumpily. “Can’t you do something?” Wilf shot her a look and I thought he was going to say something harsh. But he just removed the unlit roll-yer-own from his lower lip and looked back at the ram. He has his own daughter, Trish, who is quite possibly the only voice on the planet that can bring him to heel.
“It’s a pretty safe bet that he’s got pneumonia,” said Wilf finally. “You can give him a shot of this.” He pulled a bottle of a high-octane cattle antibiotic out of his pocket.
“I thought this was off-label for sheep.” “Everything is off-label for sheep. You can only
give him one shot. A second one will blow his heart out. If you lose him I’ll give you another ram. Let me know how you make out.”
Max was still upright in the morning, but still staring at the ground. And Fruit Loop was still sitting on the bale watching him. She looked at me with bleary eyes.
“Okay,” I sighed. “There are a few things we can do. They may not make any difference but at least we’ll know that we tried. Can you hold him for me?”
She nodded glumly. I have come to believe that behind a lot of sheep ailments there lurks some sort of vitamin deficiency and it never hurts to give them a shot of B1 and B12. After a day without food and water they dehydrate and the internal organs start shutting down so I dump a half litre of electrolytes down the throat every six hours with a stomach tube and a funnel. A few tablespoons of Ketamalt and glycol help add energy. Max submitted patiently to these ministrations and Fruit Loop held the funnel steady for me.
On Day Three, Max was still standing. At this point, if he had any chance at all it would depend on getting his digestion kick-started. We added a cupful of yoghurt and a pinch of calf rennet to the mixture and poured that down the funnel as well. On Day Four there was still no change but his temperature had returned to normal. I remembered that sometimes when a sheep goes off its feed it will get a twisted stomach and there is a technique of rolling them on their back to free it up. I just couldn’t remember which direction. I phoned Wilf again.
“Oh my,” he said. “Still standing you say? I thought you would need my backhoe by now. Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt to turn him. Let’s see. If you lay him down on his right side and sit at his head, you would roll him from right to left.”
The next morning, I was on the telephone when Fruit Loop burst into the kitchen shouting, “Dad! Dad! Max just had a poop!”
And so he got better. The only hitch was that after all those treatments, Max was now pretty used to being handled and quite friendly. By spring, he weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, and Fruit Loop banished him back up the hill to Wilf’s until we need him again next fall. The ewes all had twins.
Wilf thinks this is a great arrangement. He says that if Max ever takes a turn for the worse, he’ll be sure to call Fruit Loop.
