## Birth of a lamb

Yesterday I had the privilege of experiencing a new first: I helped deliver a baby lamb.

I guess this story needs a bit of context: I’m not a farmer, I live in a small town that has rural areas, but I wouldn’t call “countryside” at all. There’s some “countryside” very close to us, but we are not. I work as a computersmith, so my life experience hadn’t led me to be really ready for this.

My family has had, remnant of a gone past, a chicken pen for I guess forever. We get some eggs out of it, that’s it. Before that, maybe not for 30 odd years, they even used to keep a pig, but not anymore.

At some point in the last decade, my mom was given a couple sheep that she keeps around in the (big-ish) backyard. They keep the grass short, we give them extra food in the form of scraps. They are more pets than farm animals. Sometimes they give birth to more sheep, sometimes they die. I guess we’ve become a bit farmer-ish in that regard.

Last evening I let the dogs out for a run in the yard before bringing them in for the night. And one of the sheep didn’t come around to the gate as she always does. This particular sheep was ‘adopted’ at birth by our dogs after her mom rejected her. My mom bottle-fed her, and we suspect she believes she’s a dog. She’ll come to your side and nudge you with her head, demanding to be pet. But not yesterday.

So I went looking for her and found her lying down in a corner. We’ve been suspecting she might be pregnant for a while (a cousin of ours, more farmer-boy than us, brought a ram around for a while not long ago, to see what would happen…). When I tried to confort her to see what was going on, she got up and run away from me. I saw her hind-quarters were sorta wet. I went inside and told the family she might be in labor.

When we got back out, she was lying on her side in the middle of the yard. Not looking good. We could see a little lamb toe peeking out, and some … I guess amniotic sack. That’s my guess, at least. I have no idea.

I call our vet’s emergency number, and she helped us through the speakerphone (thanks for that!). My mom and I helped the ewe push, and tried to pull the lamb out. At this point, we thought neither would make it. And then I saw it.

We could see what was the little lamb’s nose peeking outside. Up to this point, we kinda believed it was dead. And then the litle fucker, only nose in the open air, expelled some air. We had to get it out.

Now that I think of it, I’m not sure at what point I made the call to the vet. I don’t recall much of the call, but I’m sure that after it was out (we now believe it’s a boy, but we’re not sure. Shows how much we know about country life) we were still on the phone. That’s when she asked me if I dared to … check if there would be more lambs. I’ll spare you the details, but we concluded that there were no more little bastards on the way.

We brought both mom and newborn inside for the night. She’s quite reluctant to let it suck, so we had to hold her in place while the lamb had a bit of dinner. My parents let them out this morning, in hopes they would be more relaxed. Little idiot seems healthy and has been running around already, following its mom begging for some food. I might have to help with that several times a day from now on.

The idiot seems partially convinced I’m his mom, I believe. He was following me around last night already trying to suck from my jeans. Very cute.

It was quite the lucky strike that I noticed she wasn’t around last evening, to be honest. The lamb is huge (almost as big at birth as one of his “cousins” born a month ago), and she was definitely having trouble with the birth. If all of this had started an hour later, who knows if any of them would have made it…

Not much more to say. Just now, the vet called me to see how they were doing. And to refuse any sort of payment. Cool people. That’s where we take our cats, and for a reason :)

Tags: lamb, birth, experiences
=> tag_lamb.gmi lamb
=> tag_birth.gmi birth
=> tag_experiences.gmi experiences


```simple horizontal line
---------------
```

=> index.gmi gemlog index
=> ../index.gmi Capsule index
=> / Site root