Bottle Feeding Lambs
EVERYONE'S FAVOURITES - THE PODDIES
If you are breeding sheep, the chances are high, sooner or later you will need to bottle raise a lamb, and as cute as it is to watch, it comes with a range of issues; most you can control, some unfortunately, are out of hands. Everyone has different ideas on how to raise lambs, and if you have something that works for you, stay with it. If you are new and not sure what to use, these are the things that have worked for us at Sugar Gum Farm.
BOTTLES AND TEATS
If you visit your Farm shop, there is quite an array of teats available for lambs, and I can pretty much guarantee, we have tried them all, in an effort to find the best. My favourite for the small lambs is still the good, old human baby bottle and not just any old baby bottle, the (horribly expensive) $6.00 per pack of three from Woolies or Coles. Yep, $2.00 each and they are brilliant. They have never failed me, with our lambs, plus the orphans we usually get from others each year. I have even found four-week-old lambs have transferred to them from Mum. They also worked for the larger White Suffolk orphan lamb who came to us from the Vet.
They wash in hot water and sterilize well with Milton anti-bacterial solution. The teats seem to be just the right size for the smaller lambs and generally, the lambs you are bottle feeding are the smaller ones, the premmie ones, those too weak to stand and suckle from Mum, or who sadly, have lost their Mum. A large teat just doesn’t cut it. And if you follow the small feeds often rule, the bottles are big enough too. Even when the lambs are older, they don’t need more than 250ml per feed and with the bottles being smaller and easy to handle in size, means when you are starting a lamb off, you can squeeze the bottle a little bit to dribble the milk into the lamb’s mouth, until he/she can suck easily. I can guarantee they will be the best $6.00 investment you made. Even if you need to buy two bottles (for the “roughies”), it has only cost you $4.00, probably cheaper than a “specialized” teat.
COLOSTRUM
Colostrum is essential to the health of the lamb. Sometimes you can get by without it, but you often end up with problems down the line with infections and poor health. It carries in it all the essential immunity building products from Mum that will assist with growth, protect against disease and protect the intestines. That is why the pre-lambing ewe clostridial vaccination is vital as the antibodies are passed to the lamb through Mums’ colostrum, so it is also protected until it has its first vaccination. Mum’s colostrum is always best, followed by the colostrum of any other sheep you have. If you happen to have a Mum who has lost her lamb, you can try milking her colostrum and freezing in small zip-lock bags.
This is not often possible, so the next best thing is a bought Colostrum supplement. Our go-to is “Kwik Start”. There are others on the market, but I will swear by this one. It mixes well, the lambs love it and it works.
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ALWAYS BRING YOUR COLOSTRUM TO ROOM TEMPERATURE NATURALLY OR BY DEFROSTING IN WARM WATER. NEVER MICROWAVE.
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Colostrum is full of anti-bacterials and immunoglobulins and microwaving kills them off.
Colostrum needs to be fed in the first 24 hours and more in the first twelve hours. Lambs have a permeable gut lining that can allow ingested bacteria and toxins into the blood stream. The lamb’s slow gut movements in the first 24 hours give the bacteria more time to establish and multiply. The sooner the lamb gets colostrum after birth, the better its chances of being healthy.
A BIG NO-NO
You will sometimes see people recommending a home-made colostrum using milk/cream, egg and olive oil. Okay, it may give a bit of strength, but there is nothing in that to give immunity to a lamb, and in Australia, it is illegal to feed meat protein products, of which egg is one, to sheep. When we have picked up orphaned lambs from our Vet, they give them a small dose of Penicillin, if they don’t know the age of the lamb or whether the lamb has had Colostrum. Although this is a help, it is never as good as the colostrum from a vaccinated ewe.
If using any of the bought colostrum, follow the mixing guide and feed small amounts often during the first 24 hours. Lambs require at least 10% of their body weight , in colostrum over the first 24 hours.
MILK FORMULA
After the colostrum, comes the milk formula and once again, there are seemingly endless options ranging from the large bags of powdered milk replacement formula from the Feed Stores to the many different makes of cow's milk from the Supermarkets. At one stage or another, over many years, we have tried most of them.
Obviously the best thing to feed lambs is sheep milk, but it is not found in abundance and as I looked more into the components of this wonderful milk, I found out many things. Sheep milk is higher in fat and protein than cow's and goat milk and has more vitamins and minerals than any other kind of animal milk. It is also higher in lactose. Unlike cow and goat milk, sheep milk does not contain the A1 protein, which often causes digestive issues for some people. The main problem with any milk replacement for lambs is the possibility of Abomasal bloat, which can kill a lamb very quickly. Thinking this could be one of the problems with cow's milk and lambs, we swapped over to A2 cow's milk, which also does not have the A1 protein, but instead the A2 beta-casein. Since changing over to A2 milk, we have had no issues with bloat or any digestive problem in a bottle fed lamb, so this is now our go-to milk.
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In an effort to mimic sheep milk as closely as possible, ad because sheep milk is higher in fats, protein, vitamins and minerals than cow's milk, we fortify our milk formula, by adding powdered A2 milk to the bottled A2 milk. Adding regular powdered milk would defeat the purpose of using A2, so we add the A2 powder in a ratio of a heaped half cup of A2 powder to 2 litres of A2 milk. I mix this in a jug before refrigerating it. We warm our milk to body temperature before feeding it to the lambs.
We work on the 15-20% body weight of milk to be fed over the 24-hour period and start off feeding every two hours, including during the night. We don’t feed over 250ml of milk in one feed, regardless of how big the lambs are, and we don’t feed over one litre per day.
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Again, if you have your own favourite lamb rearing formula and practice, please stay with it. These are the things that have worked for us, that may be helpful for our new breeders, when faced with the challenges of “the always cute, but fraught with worry” bottle babies.