Firstly, the grey cria, not dead (huzzah!):
Shed pics: status as of Sunday AM, status as of Monday AM, and an in-progress shot (Look out ! Giant Puma !)
And finally, this may be a little hard to see in the thumbnail, but Illustration Number 4 Why Stephen Should Clean His Ute:
So, we have spent most of this long weekend working like mad on the shed- but more on that later.
Yesterday (Sunday) morning we fed out the supplemental food to the girls. Tam noticed that the little grey cria was colicy, getting up and down, rolling on his side, and humming in discomfort. We moved them all down to the dog run, and looked at our first-aid references. Unfortunatley most of them were along the lines of “could be anything, call your vet.” This is not that helpful, as there is a harsh economic calculus- a vet-call on a holiday Sunday could cost us more than the little boy is worth.
I went through the notes I had been given in the vet-conference we attended last weekend and found the helpful comment “most cases of colic are due to gastric spasms, treat with (drug we don’t have), or 1 ml/kgg parafin oil (which we do have)”. We squirted the oil down his gullet. There was not the instant improvement I really wanted. After another hour we moved them back to the paddock, hoping that moving around might help clear it all up. An hour after that Tam went up to check on him, and got him on his feet and moving (he was laying on his side in a most pathetic fashion). While he was moving around she saw a ripple of movement as his guts seemed to re-arrange themselves, but that seems to have fixed it. An hour after that he was grazing normally next to his mum. *whew*. I checked him this morning and he seemed fine.
It is nice to have a medical issue that does not end in the acute death of the animal. Losing Chris like that last year was rather a shock. We were comforting ourselves over lunch yesterday that at least this time there would not be the second-guessing if he died. We are running a much tighter ship management-wise now. The dubious plants are fenced off, and everyone is up to date with their vaccinations, drenching and vitamins. But even with all this things can go wrong- we just hope they don’t anytime soon.