Circle M Farm

We almost lost Bounce this week.

A few days ago I came home after a full day of errands to find our house lamb limp and nearly unresponsive in the hay-filled water trough we use for a lamb play-pen when we are not home to supervise him. I lifted him out onto the floor, expecting him to follow me around like he usually does at feeding time, but he could barely get purchase on the painted boards and he was listing to the side as though on the deck of a ship. He didn’t seem to be able to find where I was, waving his head around in a dazed manner. He feebly tried to follow me, but kept veering off to this side, then that side, careening into furniture to keep his balance, then laying his head on things to keep standing up. He cried out to me as though from somewhere far away, his voice a faint, off-key accordion wheeze.

The moment I saw Bounce’s drunken gait, a little lightbulb went off deep in my mind. Polio. Bounce had polio, I was pretty sure, based on my repeated reading of the sheep manual I keep stacked with all my other animal manuals in the living room. I’d never actually had an animal afflicted with the condition on my farm, but I recognized the symptoms: “blindness, depression, incoordination, extreme salivation, coma and death,” said Storey’s Guide to Sheep Raising, which is chronically brief in its treatment of disease descriptions. A quick survey of internet entries expanded the list to include: “star gazing” and “the sudden onset of blindness. Animals separate from the mob, wander aimlessly or stand in one place often adopting a head-high or head-low posture or head-pressing against solid objects.”

This described Bounce almost to a T, with the exception of salivation, which I definitely did not see. But I’d been worried about his eyes for a while, as both were cloudy and odd-looking. I’d been treating them with a garlic herbal preparation to no avail, and even the last resort on my farm, antibiotics. Because he’d been left alone at birth and not cleaned up by his mom, I thought it likely he’d contracted an infection while on the ground. But with this sudden appearance of “aimless wandering,” the puzzle pieces were rapidly clicking into place. Several web entries listed “blindness” as the earliest-appearing symptom of polio, but until I’d seen some of the others I wasn’t thinking in that direction at all.

Being a caretaker to livestock, though it certainly involves a different uniform and different setting, can be a lot like being on the team of doctors at the center of the television series “House.” In the show, Dr. Gregory House and his team of talented, opinionated fellow physicians tackle medical mysteries in a Sherlock Holmes-type story format, following clues first down one alley and then another. Symptoms, circumstances and psychology all come into play as they study their patients and put their heads together, combing through medical literature, anecdotal folk remedies, their own past experiences and gut intuitions to come up with appropriate diagnoses and treatments.

The country vet stories of James Herriot, one of my most beloved authors, often take the same shape as a House episode. Herriot, practicing veterinary medicine in rural England in the 1940s to 1960s England, is called upon to rescue various farm animals in distress. He collaborates with a cast of hilarious characters from canny old farmers, pompous young veterinary students, superstitious town medicine men, village drunks and the partners in his practice to solve the medical mysteries of his animal charges. I love Herriot even more now that I have my own animals, because I can identify with his late nights poring over veterinary encyclopedias and professional journals while not being able to sleep until the mystery is solved.

Many of Herriot’s stories actually involve sheep, as they were of major economic importance both for meat and wool at that time in England. But veterinarians in today’s America, with the exception of the Dakotas and a few other ranch states out west, know very little about sheep. My town vet is a dairy cow guy, as are most rural vets in the Midwest, and he has flat-out told me there isn’t much he can do for sheep. “Mostly they want to die,” were his actual words.

Well, thank goodness, that’s not been my experience. But it has been my experience, and that of other local shepherds, that most vets out here aren’t going to be our main resource for sheep health information. So that means that like House and Herriot, we all assemble a hodge-podge of advisors around ourselves to process and investigate health issues when they come up. Among my close neighbors, I count at least 5 other shepherds I regularly call on, one of whom has 30-plus years of experience. We all have libraries of books we share. And the internet has become a fabulous way to connect with a tremendous network of farmers and researchers. In Bounce’s case, I typed in “sheep polio symptoms” the moment I had my inkling, and was instantly in touch with small homestead blogs, research papers from universities, sheep breeder associations and veterinary references that confirmed my hunch and laid out a clear course of treatment.

But of course none of that available expertise is a substitute for our own careful study of the animals under our watch. Bounce’s cloudy eyes were not much of a clue in and of themselves, and since I was treating them initially with herbal remedies (which overall act slower than conventional medicines), the few weeks the symptoms persisted weren’t really out of the ordinary. But in retrospect, I had noticed a few other things that were not right. For one, he had stopped pooping when walking around the house. I assumed he was pooping in his water trough playpen, but I didn’t check. When I actually checked the playpen, after I suspected polio, it turned out there hadn’t been a single poop produced in the week since we’d last cleaned the trough out. Constipation is an infrequently-mentioned symptom of polio that showed up on one website, though others mentioned “loss of rumen function.” In addition, I had not seen Bounce eat hay for a while, though he was still nursing well and munching lots of corn.

Polio in sheep, actually polioencephalomalacia, or cerebrocortical necrosis, is a disease of the central nervous system – hence the lack of coordination that showed up when the condition had advanced. But, unlike human polio which affects the nervous system via a virus, sheep polio is actually a nutritional issue. Sheep have very complicated digestive systems, involving four stomachs, and are primarily adapted to consuming grass. When sheep eat more grain than grass, their uptake of thiamine, or Vitamin B1, is hampered by acidic conditions in their rumen, or first stomach. Thiamine is important for brain functioning, and the nervous system degenerates without it. Eating grain is always a rather dangerous proposition for ruminants, for this and other reasons, so we don’t feed a lot of it on our farm. But the addition of corn, which is like candy to pretty much all animals, in a bottle-baby’s diet stretches out the time between feedings and gets us a bit more sleep! Ah, compromise.

Usually, the consumption of a little bit of corn, alongside milk and hay, doesn’t cause a big problem for lambs. However, Bounce seems to have very little taste for hay – probably because he has no mom to model eating it, and we can’t really model that for him. Plus, he is still a little young to digest much hay, so I hadn’t worried about it yet. But the day he really started to exhibit serious symptoms of polio, he’d been left alone for a longer time than usual and had substituted lots of corn for the milk feedings he didn’t get.

Luckily, Bounce’s symptoms had progressed from “blindness and constipation” to “clumsiness and head-pressing” without getting all the way to “depression and coma” before we diagnosed him. And treatment for this particular ailment is almost ridiculously easy – Vitamin B shots every other day until the symptoms reverse. One website even assured us that sight could return within seven days, and we actually saw evidence of Bounce’s vision having improved in three. Getting the digestive system straightened out is a bit trickier, since the complicated environment of the rumen relies on a tricky balance of nutrients, roughage and various intestinal flora. We jump-started things with a small addition of castor oil to Bounce’s milk bottle, and now his bowels are moving – but looser than we’d like to see for very long. For that we’re adding helpful live cultures to his bottles, in the hope that they’ll get established in his gut and slow the stool down.

Long-term Bounce will have to get interested in hay in order to thrive and in the short term we’ll have to limit his intake of corn, rather than feed it free-choice. We can also substitute other grains, like barley, buckwheat or oats, that are less delicious and less acid-producing than the all-purpose candy grain. For right now, our little trooper is enjoying a remarkable recovery. The vitamin shots seemed to take care of the weakness and stumbling in a day, and an interesting side-effect is that his ability to nurse from the bottle for a sustained time has increased from about 20 seconds to three minutes. He is like a totally different lamb with the bottle now, which makes me suspect that a thiamine deficiency was at the root of his early inabilities to stay on the nipple. Next time I have a weak lamb that can’t suck for long, I’ll give a Vitamin B shot instantly. He’s also gone from being a rather placid follower to being a great runner and leaper around the house. Within days, he’ll be jumping out of the tall water trough we corral him in, and it will be time for him to move outside into a pen in the barn. Bounce is finally living up to his name!