Twin Lamb Disease

Just thought I would make a forum topic about this as it cropped up in chat and thought it might be quite interesting to the wider audience!

From Lynda:

"if the sheep come close to the cam, you may notice they have brown round their necks and faces. This is because today we have given them a trough full of neat molasses which they love and it helps to keep their energy levels up now that we are only three weeks away from lambing"

"it also helps to avoid what is known as 'twin lamb disease' when the growing lambs inside their mums sap all the sheeps energy and they become short of calcium and magnesium which sends them into a sort of coma if not spotted in time"

"this is more likely to happen a week or so before lambing and a week or so after lambing when the calcium is being used by the lambs for bone formation and for their milk after lambing. The sheep cant keep up with the demand on their calcium and hence " twin lamb disease" sets in"

The above pic isn't quite our sheep yet but they do like that mollasses :P

Thanks for the information Dan. Very educational. :)

"Neat molasses" is what was known here as "blackstrap molasses", and was given to children as a winter tonic.  Both of my parents used to talk about "blackstrap", which they were made to take by the spoonsful to keep them healthy when they were young.  I don't know if farmers used it for animals, but they probably did.  It would have been in very common use, and probably formed the basis for children's tonics even when I was a child, with the same dark colour.  Full of iron and all kinds of other good things!

we always try to avoid this , obviously, as it causes the sheep a lot of distress and the treatment is particularly nasty. The sheep has to have two injections of pure calcium under the skin and it is very painful for them. In extreme cases, when they are pretty "far gone" into the coma like state, the calcium has to be injected directly into the jugular. This in itself can prove fatal for the sheep as the direct insurge can cause a heart attack. So obviuosly we do as much as possible to avoid the occurence of twin lamb disease

The disease is also more likely to affect older sheep which are carrying two or more lambs i.e. triplets or quads

When I was little my best friend was the local pharmacist's daughter.  His shop got samples of Vick cough sweets and little bottles of Delrosa rose hip syrup. She was dosed every morning with malt, molasses, and senna (!).  I called every morning on my way to school as it was on my way and we walked together so I sometimes got dosed too (no health and safety regulations then). There was a bakery next door and we were allowed to take anything we wanted fron the day's leftovers after 5pm before they went to the pig bins. Happy memories! She became a doctor and married a dentist.

Think you may have gotten a bit confused between milk fever and twin lamb desease!