Circle M Farm

We lost Bounce yesterday. And Loki.

Bounce had been rapidly improving since his stumbling polio episode clued me in that he needed B vitamin supplements. His eating was excellent, his poops had normalized, and he’d been so energetic and hard to contain in the house, we’d given him his first few walks outside. We had even put him in the sick pen in the barn to pal around with Loki for a while.

But inexplicably, two days ago, Bounce refused to take the bottle. Eli tried to feed him at 4 pm unsuccessfully, and by 6:30 when I came home from some errands and tried to feed him, he was exhibiting far worse polio symptoms than we’d seen before. He stood still for long stretches with his nose pointed straight up to the sky – a symptom described as “stargazing” in various web entries. Then, at varied intervals, he’d suddenly throw himself around in an agitated and super-fast, uncoordinated fashion: running and banging into things without seeing them, falling and leaping back up. I gave him a B Vitamin shot ahead of schedule, and tried to feed him every few hours to no avail. I woke up in the middle of the night to give him another shot and try to feed him, but he still refused to suck or swallow. By 6 am, he was limp in his playpen, now having gone without food, except what I dribbled into the side of his mouth, for at least 15 hours.

I picked Bounce up to try and stimulate him into eating by snuggling, but he responded with a violent seizure of kicking that culminated in him ceasing to breathe. I held him until his heart stopped. Then I went out to feed Loki.

Loki had gradually grown weaker since the day, nearly a week ago, we’d found him laid out in the barn, apparently poisoned by some moldy squash. We penned him in a private stall, checked several times a day that he was close to water, salt, minerals and food while I fed him a daily vitamin and energy supplement by mouth. Though he seemed to want to stand only briefly, he did continue to eat and poop a lot, so I hoped the mycotoxins were working out of his body. But he stood up less and less, rather than longer and longer. Yesterday morning, he stayed down. But he did eagerly swallow the water and vitamins I dripped into the side of his mouth with a syringe. Unfortunately, he died that afternoon.

Perhaps because he was so small, Loki couldn’t recover from ingesting the mold. Cream, however, who aborted a very small kid two days after eating the squash, seems to be healthy as ever. Thankfully, no one else in the flock that had access to the squash seems to have any symptoms at all. But I feel over-all fragile and depressed by the week’s events. The girls were shocked and saddened to find that Bounce had died in the night. “But he was better! It’s just not fair!” said Maggie, and I shared the sentiment. I just can’t understand why he slipped back into the polio when he’d appeared to recover so completely. “It sure is quiet in here without the lamb,” said Eli this morning. It certainly is.

Shannon and Bounce on a better day.