Our sheep love nothing better than the springtime when they come off hay and move onto fresh, juicy grass. Perhaps it’s the excitement of being back on grass after months of hay, or perhaps its their digestive systems re-adjusting or both, but all that fresh forage means some of our teddy bears get messy bottoms at this time of the year.
Thankfully the messy bottom situation only lasts a couple of weeks until the little darlings get used to grass again. However, one of our teddies, Witchy, gets a messy bottom all through the spring and summer. She’s been like this ever since she was a lamb and regularly trimming the wool around her backside is one my summer jobs. A messy bottom is a magnet for flies, particularly the blowfly which can cause flystrike, a potentially deadly situation for our woolly friends.
Although Witchy is a perky little sheep with the neatest bikini line in the flock, we do worry that with her scouring she might not be absorbing nutrients as well as she should be. Every so often we check her inner eyelids for signs of anemia and we frequently condition-score her to make sure she’s not under weight.
We’ve often wondered why Witchy is so prone to scours. When she was a lamb we gave her antibiotics to save her life so it could be her gut microbiome never fully recovered. Over the years we’ve given Witchy various probiotic powders as well as kaolin powder. But nothing has made any difference.
Then, a couple of years ago I was googling ‘sheep gut health’ and I found an interesting article about something called ‘cud transfaunation’. This is where you take a wodge of cud from a healthy sheep (along with zillions of healthy gut bacteria), and pop it into the mouth of your poorly sheep (or in this case Witchy). The idea being that the healthy bacteria recolonise in the gut of the recipient sheep. I couldn’t wait to try this, you can read about it here. Unfortunately though, my efforts didn’t pay off, when spring came round, Witchy’s bottom was back to her default setting.
Last year, I decided to put Witchy on alfalfa-beet supplements (the same as her OAP friends get). She’s not quite an OAP yet, but I thought that as she entered the autumn of her life she would benefit from some extra nutrition. The result being Witchy has been in ‘the green bucket club’ for just over a year now and has done very well on it.
This spring however she came out of winter looking quite skinny despite her daily buckets. As the grass was coming through we monitored her for a few weeks hoping she’d put on weight naturally, but she didn’t. We upped her bucket rations and added in chopped up apples and carrots which she gobbled up happily. But although perky, she still didn’t put on any weight. We were flummoxed. There had to be something else going on. The three things which sprang to mind were: Johne’s disease, worms and fluke. We parked the Johne’s thought temporarily and pondered worms and fluke. Older sheep shouldn’t need regular worming (as long as they’re not in-lamb), they build natural resistance to worms as they age. But with Witchy not being the thriftiest of sheep there was a chance she’d contracted worms over the winter. Fluke was a possibility too as unfortunately sheep don’t build resistance to fluke ever.
I called the vet to double check and they agreed that worming and fluking her would be a good idea. A few minutes later I was in the car whizzing off to the vet’s to collect the various potions.
As soon as I got home I kidnapped Adrian for half an hour. I wanted Adrian to hold Witchy steady while I gave her her meds. I didn’t want to spill any of her precious medicine because I only had the exact doses and no more. Miraculously we got everything down her with zero spillages, hooray!
Wormers are fast acting and sure enough the following day Witchy was looking brighter. She spent the day busily grazing with a new sense of purpose. Within a few days she had already started to fill out a little bit.
Inspired by Witchy I also had a new sense of purpose, I decided to revisit ‘sheep gut health’. Truth be told I wasn’t keen on the idea of having to worm her regularly. Pouring meds down her throat wasn’t getting to the root of the problem, I decided this was going to be the year I would sort out her digestive issue once and for all.
My plan was to rope in the vet to help me do another cud transfaunation. I had a niggling feeling I hadn’t got enough cud from my doner sheep the last time I tried it, probably owing to the risk of losing fingers in the process. But when I presented my idea to the vet she suggested an easier option; ‘Yakult’. Apparently calves do well on it so there was a good chance it would work for sheep. I was pretty sure I’d already tried Witchy on Yakult and it hadn’t made any difference. But I thought I might as well give it another go. I wondered how much I should buy so before leaving for the shops so I quickly googled ‘how long should I take Yakult for?’. And bingo!! This mini google while I was half way out the door turned out to be one of those eureka moments …
What I discovered was that you should take probiotics for a good few weeks, not just the once, especially if you have a microbiome imbalance that needs correcting. This was a light bulb moment for me because in the past I’d only ever given Witchy just the one dose of probiotics. But (and this now makes perfect sense to me) you have to give the healthy gut bacteria time to recolonise which obviously takes a few weeks of regular dosing.
Armed with this new knowledge I bought a couple of week’s worth of Yakult and then had a little fridge re-shuffle to make room for it.
Witchy has been on Yakult now for a couple weeks and is doing amazingly well. She has a 65 ml bottle every day. After only a few days I witnessed a miracle, Witchy popped out a perfectly formed specimen made up of little pellets, hooray!
Witchy is continuing to blossom and her bottom is now always perfectly clean (which we still can’t quite believe). But most unexpectedly of all, she seems to have a new air about her, she’s much calmer and will happily stand and daydream while we give her gentle back scratches. In the past she was always on the skittish side. This is no longer the case at all. Her whole demeanour has shifted to one of a more relaxed and mellow sheep. I believe there’s a lot of truth in what they say about a healthy gut microbiome positively affecting your mood because Witchy is testament to that.
