By GF Kennedy

I get a number of calls through the season where producers report finding lambs that had appeared healthy and are now dead.

With younger lambs, starvation often is the cause. If noticed before death, tubing with warm lamb milk replacer, or preferably a milk product that has been enhanced by energy, serum and electrolytes, will bring some of them back. I don’t inject any type of energy products as this practice will damage the lamb. Injury from getting laid on is common, but often the laid-on lambs were in the process of starvation. A necropsy will determine this.

GF Kennedy

In older lambs, injury still happens and intestinal displacements are common. Recently, I found a lamb of my own today with an abomasal ulcer, something that I can’t explain. Coccidiosis is common at 3 weeks and older but seldom causes acute deaths. Respiratory problems seldom cause acute death without preceding symptoms.

Despite the best of management, occasionally a lamb is going to be found dead for a number of different reasons. Necropsy is the answer for diagnosis, but it is not always conclusive. Sending lambs to a state veterinary diagnostic lab sometimes helps, but these labs don’t always get it right, either.

Overdiagnosed diseases
My concern is that often a clostridia diagnosis, enterotoxaemia, will be made. I believe enterotoxemia and E. coli are a laboratory’s pet diagnoses when it is unable to come up with something else. Not surprising, because the lab is only presented with half the picture. Veterinarians are also likely to diagnose enterotoxemia when they fail to find a cause.

Enterotoxemia is the most overdiagnosed disease in the sheep industry. In order to make a field diagnosis, you need petechial hemorrhages on the thymus or possibly the heart, combined with an inflamed intestine. However, the petechial hemorrhage on the thymus is key. Clostridium and E coli can almost always be cultured, but that shouldn’t be translated as a diagnosis as they are often gut inhabitants.

The other concern I have about enterotoxemia is it is a disease resulting from gut-enriched media that allows for rapid proliferation of Clostridia organisms that produce a toxin that kills the animal — or if to a lesser degree, results in immunity. This happens over a period of time when animals are on concentrate rations. This is to be differentiated from acidosis, which is the result of ingesting grain in quantities greater than customary over a short period of time. Vaccinating for enterotoxemia doesn’t prevent acidosis.

When talking about things that don’t work and drug overuse, the first drug that comes to mind is Banamine. When the drug was incorporated with Nuflor to produce Resflor, it was shown to reduce fever as compared to Nuflor alone. What was never published was the mortality difference, which would lead one to suspect that temperature is an important part of the recovery process.

You will find no Banamine in my lambing barn. It’s a good drug for horse colic and that’s about it.

Kennedy is a veterinarian with Pipestone Veterinary Services. Contact him at [email protected] or [email protected].