Posted in alpacas, farming on 01/29/2009 07:57 am by Stephen
On a lighter note, it seems A1 has been secretly training her martial arts skills. Last Sunday we weighed all the girls and cria (we like to do that at least monthly). Some of them don’t like being in close-quarters with people, so some kicking is inevitable (thankfully only 10-20% of our ‘paca kick).
A1 managed to catch me at the pressure-point in the center of the calf. The muscle was sore and occasionally spasming for nearly 24 hours afterwards! Urk. Who knew they had such great aim?
Posted in alpacas, farming on 01/29/2009 07:54 am by Stephen
So, the drama of Tizona continues. She improved rapidly at first, the extra milk and electrolytes did wonders. She was gaining weight, but slowly. Then I made a mistake (I think- we are not 100% sure what went wrong) and last wednesday I decided to increase the size of her feeds. At that point, she was indistinguishable from healthy. I jumped from 240mL feeds to 360 mL feeds- and the next day she presented symptoms of colic. I probably over-fed her, and ended up getting milk in the rumen where it curdled and caused all sorts of problems. Some sodium bicarbonate took care of the cramping, but 16-24 hours of stomach cramps just drained her of energy.
We were back to square one. Lethary, ataxia. More intensive care was required, and while she improved over the weekend, it was clear her energy reserves were still very shallow. Tuesday was a bad day for her, the cold and rainy weather probably did not help. Yesterday I had bloods taken for analysis.
So, some changes of procedure were called for. She and Persil are now in the yards all the time, this way if Tizona does have energy to look for the udder, she does not have to try and find her mother (a difficult task with so many white animals, and with her energy reserves so low). She is also getting bottle fed every 90 miutes, sun-up to sun-down. We are starting to see improvements again, but she still sleeps 20+ hours a day.
And in the midst of all this Ridill managed to get a cut/abrasion on his cornea yesterday! And we are supposed to leave for holiday in two days! Thankfully we have someone who has volunteered to look after Tizona and Persil- she will be working from home to keep watch over her own pregnant girls- so we should be free to depart. Getting TIzona healthier and perkier will be good though, yesterday it could take me 20 minutes to feed her a 200 mL bottle of milk, she was so tired she kept falling asleep during the feed!