As with every undertaking there are always set backs, and unpleasant experiances that must be overcome, Littlebush is not without those, only in the last week we have lost two chickens (a rooster and hen) to Strider (one of our dogs), he seems to enjoy fresh chicken!
If the losses was just chickens it wouldn't be a problem, but so far we've lost 1 lamb (due to birthing issues), 2 lambs to coccidosis (we think), a goat to poisoning, and many other chooks. Thankfully there have also been some successess with sick animals, our queen goat (called "Queeny"), ate nothing but a urea based stock lick for a few days and ended up with Nitrogen poisoning (normally fatal within 24 hours), Steph and I diagnosed and treated it with a large drench of malt vinegar, followed with a larger drench of water. She survived, admittedly she was very happy with us, but she survived! Also 3 of our alpacas got "Staggers" from the endophyte in the grass, as did one of the ewes, and Markissa (the horse), thankfully all those survived. Oh and not forgetting the reason why we got the goats initially, they had really really bad foot rot (they couldn't even walk to the water trough about 20m away!), but thankfully just a few weeks ago, the last bit of foot rot dissappeared (through washing with copper sulphate and then iodine, and paring away the rotten flesh with a dremel and a rotary sander!) and now all three goats are on 4 hooves (now the only problem with them is Bully's bits got a bit too wet and when we cleaned up around it, and washed it, it spontanously started bleeding! We're still working on this.
The goats aren't the only things that have had foot problems, we've had a reasonably high incidence rate of foot root and scald in the sheep as well, and because of the wettness of the paddocks, even Markissa's hooves this year were not in great shape, but the farrier sorted that out!
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