So this webinar, Care of the Periparturian U2, follows on from Care of the Periparturian U1, and really they form a two-part series looking at how we can optimise the management of ewes in the run up to lambing in that ever crucial periparturian period. So last time we looked more at the actual clinical conditions, the metabolic disorders, this time we'll look more at housing, nutrition, colostrum and that kind of nutritional input to reduce the risk of those conditions developing, but also to look at how we maximise lamb survival, so. By the end of this webinar, attendees should be able to advise clients on appropriate housing requirements for the peripartuian you, advise on the nutritional requirements of the peripartuian E, and understand how this influences colostrum quality.
Understand when and how to screen ewes in late gestation, to assess the quality of nutrition and be able to advise what changes are required, and understand how to manage uterineine and vaginal prolapses, as well as how nutrition affects the incidence rates of those. You'll remember this slide from part one of this two part series, but it's a really important thing that really factors into what we're looking at here, because it's all about nutrition. Even if you're more focused on the actual clinical condition or the individual sick animal, those metabolic disorders are still driven by nutritional requirement failures during the late gestation or early lactational period, and it's not always just about, What's in the ration, we've got to look at the other practical inputs as well, so supply of feed, access to feed, quality of feed, access to water, and stocking density will have a large impact as well on the ability of the ewe to meet their nutritional requirements in that late gestation, early lactational period.
So there's lots of ways you can divide the sheep year up and different companies, different colleges, different universities and different textbooks will all use their own systems. For me, I like to break it into 4 parts, so post-weaning, breeding period and 1st 100 days of pregnancy, late pregnancy and lambing, and then lactation and weaning. So obviously, when we're looking at this lecture.
It's the late pregnancy and alarming period that we need to focus on. And there are some simple practical things we can do in this period to maximise our understanding of if those nutritional requirements are being met and simple things that we can teach our clients, no matter how experienced they are, to be able to analyse. And I'm sure most of you would agree, the most important skill when working with sheep and assessing sheep health is to do an effective and reliable body condition score.
It's a quick and simple management tool, and it allows you to assess the body reserves of the sheep at different points throughout the year. Ensuring the animals are in their target condition at key stages of the reproductive cycle offers clear benefit. We can understand if those needs are being met, which can increase scanning, lambing, and weaning percentages.
Allows earlier and better interventions to reduce human mortality. Increases the odds of producing viable and larger lambs that have good immunity at birth. Increase winning weights.
Increase and understand the production of colostrum in milk, and we know if you're in target body condition score, it improves the maternal behaviour of ewes as well. And the number one thing I would say to anybody, vet student, client. Farm assistant You can't effectively assess the body condition score of a sheep without putting your hands on the sheep.
It's a practical, not a visual assessment, particularly if you're doing this when the ewes or the lambs are in full fleece, there's no way you can actually effectively assess the body condition without getting hands on. So you can see from these images from FAS, the two sites we're looking at. We want to be palpating the lumbar spine, so after the ribs, before the hips, to get that measure of cover, feeling the transverse or horizontal processes, and feeling if we can palpate the spinnius or vertical processes as well.
One of the places we see people go wrong is they'll palpate two cranial over the ribs, more like you might do in a dog or a cat, or they don't run their hand to see if they can get underneath those transverse processes and feel if it's digging in. And we need to remember. One unit of body condition score equates to 10 to 12% of the mature live weight of a ewe.
So for a 70 kilogramme ewe, that's 8.4 kilogrammes for one unit of body condition score, for a 90 kilogramme ewe, 10.8 kilogrammes, or for a smaller animal, 50 kg perhaps, you're still looking at 6 kg.
And it takes approximately 6 weeks to gain 1 unit of body condition score on good quality pasture. If you're not familiar with body condition scoring, if you want a refresher, or if you're looking for a good resource to help you teach clients or support clients. AHDB have an excellent how-to video on their YouTube channel.
And they produce some really nice resources such as this one here that really shows what we'd see on a cross section at the different stages and talks through what we're feeling. So the aim is to assess. Adequate condition for that system at that time of year, so we all know, you need different body conditions to score targets at different times of year, but it's important to be at the right condition for your production system, so there's variation between hill, lowland and upland, but for the right time of year as well.
Some practical tips that will mean you get a realistic result. The you needs to be relaxed and not compressed. So it's really hard to do with the animal tightly squeezed up in a corner.
The U needs to be on all four legs, it's really hard to assess if the U is tipped because of the. Way the weight is then repositioned, we want them nicely stood, stood evenly on four limbs, so you don't want them squeezed in a squeezed crush either. In a normal race, it's definitely doable, as in that picture before, but not in one of those squeeze crushes where it holds the ewe tight.
Operators should use the same hand to reduce any variability and. The other important thing is this isn't something you do once a year, we need to do it at those different points of the production cycle and know where we need those numbers to be, but also we need reliability between people, so actually if the same person carries out the body condition scoring every time, we know they'll score consistently themselves, even if there's very slight variation between how two people do it. So, looking at this late pregnancy and lambing section of the sheep here.
We know we're looking at days 100 to 150. And it's such a key stage, because if we get everything right in this 50 day window, day 100 to 150, then we'll reduce the risk of metabolic disorders, reduce the risk of dystopia or difficult lambings, we can reduce the risk of prolapses, but increase lamb vigour, lamb survival, and improve the quality of colosum. So it's such an essential stage for giving those lambs the best possible start.
Remembering 70% of foetal growth occurs in the last 6 weeks of pregnancy. Scanning information lets us target feeling effectively between twin bearing views, Us bearing singles, and if we have triplets, triplets. We've got to get the housing provision correct to get adequate feed and water access and supply.
And as mentioned, if we do this right, we'll reduce the risks of the metabolic disorders, the alarmbing problems. Get the nutrition right and we can increase the quality and quantity of colostrum. So, within this 50 day window, we've got a golden 35 day window, day 110 to 145.
Where it's essential that we feed to maintain body condition score, talking about different scores at different points of the production system and, Different scores for different systems, we want a 3.0 for Lowland, 2.5 for Hill and Upland.
We use our scanning information to feed to scan, and we consider how, when and why in this window, we need to start to supplement twins and triplets. And that's driven a lot by the energy requirements. So a 75 kg ewe at day 100, if they're grazing, well, if they've got a single, they need 1.1 times maintenance, so 13 megajoules of metabolizable energy per day, and if we've got 10 megajoule metabolizable energy grass, then that's 1.5 kilogrammes of dry matter per day.
Bearing twins, then the energy requirements are bigger already. At day 100, 1.5 times maintenance, 16.5 MJME or 1.8 kilogrammes of dry matter per day of that 10 mJME grass.
But it changes very quickly as we get even nearer lambing. So in the late gestational period, so moving on from day 100. Lake gestation, we need twice maintenance.
And that's between 18 and 20 megajoules of metabolizable energy for our 75 kilogramme lowland ewe. In late gestation 2 to 2.5% of body weight dry matter intake is achievable, which normally is approximately 1.6 kilogrammes of dry matter.
But to get to our 18 and 20 megajoules of metabolizable energy for our 75 kg lowland ewe, we've got to push on for almost 2 kilogrammes of grass for dry matter, and that's good quality grass as well. So we can see that's not achievable. So supplementary concentrates often required at this point to meet that late gestational requirement and prevent us going into an energy deficit, increasing the risk of ovine pregnancy, toxaemia, and other metabolic disorders.
So we have to maximise. By supplementing with concentrates, but we need to maximise forage and ensure that concentrates are only a supplement. If we provide a diet that's 75% forage to 25% concentrate, because of the way the ruminal microbiome works, it's designed more for that forage component rather than lots of short chain carbohydrates in the concentrates.
75% forage to 25% concentrate is digested much better than 75% concentrate with a small sprinkling of forage. We've got to remember at this point as well, one of the big risks when we start adding more short chain carbohydrates, supplementing with concentrates, is ruinal acidosis. So we never want to provide more than 500 grammes per feed of concentrates, otherwise we increase the risk of ruminal acidosis to a level that's very high risk and not where we need to be.
So to make sure that we bring the concentrates in and we support the rumen flora, we let it adapt to having more concentrates in the diet. It's important to consider things such as stepped feeding and not just turning concentrates on and that maximum amount that they need. So we've got to gradually build up the amount given and acclimatise the rumen flora to prevent ruminal acidosis developing.
So this is one example of how we could do stepped feeding starting from 6 weeks out. As you'd expect We need more concentrates because the energy demands are greater, the more lambs in utero, so 6 weeks out for a single. 0.2 kilogrammes building to 0.5 kilogrammes two weeks out, but if we look at our triplets, then we need to start six weeks out with 0.5 kilogrammes, and actually by two weeks out, we'll be on 1 kilogramme per head per day, so obviously, we see, for all of these ones in italics here, we should be splitting this to, Perhaps twice a day or even 3 times a day so that we're not overloading with concentrates and increasing that risk of rheminal acidosis.
And importantly, we've got to provide sufficient ad lib forage, aiming at least 65% forage to 25% concentrate. A lot of farms have a protocol, they have a way of feeding in the periparterian period, which is what they do, but actually, we now know as we get better at formulating diets, as we can do more assessment of foragers. Do we need concentrates in every scenario?
Because if we have really good quality forage, the best silli, actually high metabolizable energy means we can use less concentrates. So one example here, if we fed a high quality grass solid, then we know some of these 11.5 megajoules of metabolizable energy is possible.
A 75 kg ewe in late pregnancy can take in 1.6 kilogrammes of dry matter intake. And forage and twice maintenance means they'd need 17 megajoules.
So if they take in their 1.6 kilogrammes of this high quality, 11.5 megajoule metabolizable energy grass solid.
They'd achieve 18.4 megajoules of metabolizable energy, sufficient energy intake needed, no concentrates required, and no risk of increasing the chance of rheninal acidosis. So it can be done, but we need to be more confident as vets and better at analysing forage, helping to formulate diets, and being involved in that conversation and not just being reactionary and only being called out when there's a downer you with pregnancy toxaemia.
We can have the best diet on paper, we can have done the analysis, we can formulate it, but if the diet doesn't get into the sheep, it doesn't matter how good it is. So access to feed space and water is so important. And I'm sure all of you listening will have been in lambing barns like this.
Big groups of the ewes prior to lambing that then get penned into individual maternal pens with their lambs after lambing, and therefore the stocking density wildly varies. Obviously it's really high at the start and then as ewes lamb and start to be drafted off into individual pens, then the stocking density comes down, access to feed and water will improve, but if we look at this one on the top right hand corner, this could be just after housing. Do they have enough feed and water access, I feed only down this side on the left hand side, if we look at this one at the bottom on the right.
We can see there's feed in the middle for it, but actually there's only one water drinker in that back corner by the doors where that ewe's got her head down as well, so is there sufficient, because if there isn't sufficient access to feed and water, What will happen, well then we'll get significant peaks and troughs in the intake of feed by individual animals, and that's more likely to cause acidosis because of the peaks of carbohydrates coming in, and we're more likely to see other metabolic disorders too, as we touched on in part one of this series. So housing requirements, housing systems of which there are lots of different systems used in the UK and if we took a global view, the variety would be even greater. But with a UKI.
The best place to look Will be the code of recommendations for welfare of sheep. So whether it's corals, slatted flooring, traditional pens like those images before, must be of sufficient size to allow all livestock to lie down simultaneously, ruminate, rise, turn around, and stretch without difficulty. Recommended space allowances for lowland views, you only, so.
Before lambing, 1.2 to 1.4 metres squared per year.
For here we use 1.0 to 1.2 metres squared per ewe, and we can see we've got lambs and rams there as well.
And it would be really interesting to look at this with some of your clients, to do some housing analysis and when they're at their peak, when all of the ewes come in for lambing before any of them have started, is there sufficient space allowance? Is there sufficient access? Because we've got to make sure they have sufficient access to feed and water as well.
So the animal welfare codes, which are mirrored in a lot of the farm assurance standards, so we see here the ones from Red Tractor. Water supply is sufficient to cover times of peak demand. And sufficient trough space or drinkers for the number of livestock.
A drinking space is defined as one bowl or bucket, and if it's troughs, we're aiming for 10 centimetres per animal as a minimum. When we think about feed. Minimum of 50 centimetres per ewe at the feed face, but concentrates, but actually new advice says, in late gestation, when generally our ewes tend to be wider with the lambs in utero, particularly if twins or triplets, 80 centimetres would be preferable.
If we're providing ad-lib forage as well, so perhaps that long feed face where the forage is. 10 to 15 centimetres per you as a minimum. And one drinking space per 20 years as a minimum, and again more preferable in late pregnancy because of the increased width of the animals, and if we're doing water troughs, it's 10 centimetres per animal.
And we talk a lot about. Water requirements, dehydration, rehydration in dairy cattle, I think we all know a lot about the water requirements to produce milk in lactation of dairy cows. But we don't talk about it so much for sheep.
So, in late pregnancy, a year requires 4.5 litres per day of water that's clean, potable and drinkable. But it, in the same way it would for a dairy cow, when we get into lactation, it rises significantly, and actually it can be as much as 10 litres of fluid intake per ewe per day, and for a while, when we're indoors in really quite tight, potentially, High stocking density environments, ensuring free flowing water or if we're doing buckets that they're filled up quickly enough and kept clean.
And no contamination, it's important, but we've all been in farms where lambing is so hectic and busy that maybe the buckets and the individual pens, where the ewe is penned with a lamb, might only get changed once a day, and it could be contaminated with faeces within half an hour of that, and then we know the ewe won't drink anything. So it's so important that we pay proper attention to provision of water. So looking at.
Other things we can do in terms of looking at the diets and understanding the impact of the nutrition and if the diet is providing what's required. Albumin, beta hydroxybutyrates, urea, so important. Calcium and magnesium we also test them and are also important, but we have covered this when we looked at hypercalcemia and hypomagnesaemia in the previous webinar.
So, as we get near alarming, 4 weeks prior to alarmbing, obviously, we want to be giving those clostridial boosters to start boosting the immunity and improving the ability for transferring the clostrum, which we'll come to, but 2 to 3 weeks. We want to be looking at doing pre-lambing blood tests and analysing what's going on, and understanding the impact of the nutrition and if the diet is providing what it needs. So we can analyse albumin.
Albumin concentration in ewes is a measurement of long-term protein status. We know albumin concentration generally decreases during pregnancy, particularly in the latter stages, and that's because of the increased foetal growth, 70% in the last six weeks, and as the ewe prepares for lactation. It's been demonstrated in experimentally protein restricted ewes, so ewes that received 60% of their metabolizable protein requirements, that birth weights and lamb size at birth was lower.
And that's not surprising because we know with that 70% of foetal growth in the last 6 weeks that inadequate supply of dietary protein leads to depletion of maternal body protein and lamb losses and lower birth weights. Rob Kelly at Edinburgh has shown that actually higher albumin reduces the chance of losing lambs between scanning and 24 hours postpartum. And we also know on these tests, we wanna look at beta hydroxybutyrate.
We touched on these in the last webinar when we spoke about ovary pregnancy toxaemia. But the elevation of beta hydroxybutyrates indicates excess fat mobilisation, indicates negative energy balance, it's an indicator of risk of ovine pregnancy toxaemia. In a clinically sick animal, obviously it's a confirmation of clinical disease, and it may also indicate subclinical disease if screening is carried out.
So we covered this in greater detail last webinar, but in that same work from Edinburgh, Rob Kelly also showed lambs born toe with a high BHB concentration and an increased risk of failure of passive transfer, which obviously correlates with lamb survival. And we can look at short-term protein as well, particularly RDP. And that's where testing ureaa comes in, so RDP indicates recent term protein.
Low urea means more likely to have poor colostrum and a reduced milk yield. So starting with an 18% crude protein, that's a good starter in late pregnancy compound feed, especially as we know the high protein needs for producing that top quality colostrum and getting that maximal lamb growth in that last six weeks. Practically, what do we advise our farmers?
Well, we advised they need to sample at least 5 ewes per group per number of lambs, so. 5 ewes bearing singles, 5 ewes bearing twins, and 5 bearing triplets, but if they've got different lambing groups, then we need to be 2 to 3 weeks before, so if they've got an early group, it's 5 at each stage, and if they've got a late group that lambs 6 to 8 weeks later, you need to go back and blood sample those 2 to 3 weeks before they start as well to understand properly if the rattling is providing what's required. When we do these tests, we get the albumin, the beta hydroxybutyrate, and the urea, we'll also get calcium and magnesium readings, and we covered calcium and magnesium in the previous webinar, when we looked at hypercalcemia and hypermagnesaemia as well.
So I've said that the urea and the protein really impacted colostrum, and that's because colostrum, as we all know, is a direct reflection of nutrition. Better colostrum comes from ewes that have received better nutrition. Hopefully everyone's familiar with the campaign Colostrum is Gold and the awareness, but it's always worth reminding ourselves the queues of Colostrum.
So, we need to supply it quickly, we need to supply sufficient quantity, 200 mLs per kilogramme within 24 hours, and a first feed, 50 mL per kilogramme within 2 hours. We need to be talking to our clients about checking the quality of their colostrum as well. Bricks 3 fractometers, they're about 5 pounds online, really cheap and so effective, and we need to also make sure people are using the right threshold.
So whilst the threshold is 22% for calves, for sheep, we need a minimum of 26.5%. And we need to make sure that it's squeaky clean as well.
Colostrum can't be left out and uncovered where biofilm formation can occur, and we can then risk contamination. So Other things we can do with colostrum, you know, if we have excess colostruum, if we have a ewe that lands a dead lamb, then we want to harvest that colostrum, we can absolutely freeze it, store it, and then thaw it later, but if we're doing that, make sure we're not getting clients. Defrosting in the microwave, that will denature the proteins, it's much better to put it in a bag, and put that bag in a, a warm body temperature bowl of water and naturally thaw it that way, we've got devices like the The utterly easy milker, you know, that can really aid to stripping out of you, making it a lot easier than it has been in the past.
So what does the literature tell us? All this paper I think it's one of the most important pieces of vine research and literature. From recent years, it looked at something that hadn't been fully analysed or well assessed previously.
64 Welsh farms, just under 1300 ewes data was included in the study. They looked at age, breed, body condition score, number of live lambs, number of dead lambs, add a condition, and they tested the colostrum, reported the BRICS readings and the colour as well as an indicator. So what does it tell us?
They found 24% of samples recorded did not meet 26.5% BRICS threshold that was required. The greatest variation between flocks was seen rather than within flocks, so this really shows the importance of nutrition because flock flock variation is very much driven by different nutrition, different rations, different diets on different farms, and also we now know.
And there's been a lot of work this year where farms that traditionally have probably had quite good forage, we've done the testing this year and because of the hot summer, or the really dry summer, the quality of the forage is not as good. So if you've got a farm, That has had good colostum in previous years and have done forage analysis in previous years, that doesn't mean that they can get away without testing this year, because we know the forage quality varies so much year on year, particularly with the weather events that we've been seeing in more recent years. So 279 samples tested across 64 farms and 74.8% were classed as adequate.
If you want a really practical tip to advise farmers. As an early indicator. The ease of stripping Colostrum directly linked with.
The quality of the colostrum as well, so if it was really, really hard to express, you know, it couldn't really get any out, then that meant the colostrum was probably not of as good a quality. So that's a high you related factor to go alongside testing it on a bricks when you have been able to express it. So other factors, body condition score as we see thinner ewes, poorer nutrition, worse quality colostrum.
Insufficient feed space, poor nutritional intake. Worst quality colossum. Lower protein quality.
Again, affects the quality of the nutrition, affects the protein intake in the pre-lambing period, and the coloss are more likely not to meet the threshold. And again, We've spoken about why it's important to supplement twins and triplets, particularly, and on farms that didn't do it, more of their colossum samples failed, as we'd expect. So condition score, access to feed, quality of feed, protein concentration, all important for influencing the quality of glosslin.
Jacking Colostrum is vital. But what we found when we did our survey and our clinical audit into you, ewe caesarean sections and lambings. Almost 20% of vets that were called out to assist with an obstetrical case didn't check the presence or quality of colostrum after doing caesarean section or carrying out an assisted vaginal delivery.
So if we're there as vets and we're called to a lambing or a Caesar, it's so important that we do check that you have colostrum, it is expressible and we get the clients to check the quality too. And actually now Can we test lambs to assess the uptake of IgG as well? This is something that we've been doing in dairy carts for a long time now, but now there's good quality data to show zinc sulphate turbidity test readings that correlate to lamb tests rather than having to use a cattle threshold.
So if we do a ZST test, 2 to 7 days of life, then the target is greater than 14 for adequate IgG. Best results if we can bleed lambs that are 24 to 72 hours old. So top tips when we look at colostrum and nutrition and housing in the periparterian period.
It's all about nutrition, it underpins everything all year round in sheep health and production. What the sheep eat remains more important than what the ration sheet says. If the food and the water isn't taken in, then it can be the best quality ration, but if the ewes can't access it, it's not gonna have any benefit.
Body condition score remains the most accessible way to assess current and historic impact of nutrition. Remember it's taking approximately 6 weeks to raise 1 unit of body condition, but it's only reliable when it's done by trained staff who are consistent at scoring, understand the the scoring system, and when it's repeated throughout the year. Body condition score cannot be a one and done test.
And as vets, we need to be engaging with clients more in the pre-lambing period, getting more involved in diet formulation, nutritional advice, and not just be responsive to the individual sick animal. We can use pre-lambing visits and pre-lambing blood profiles to be proactive, engage our clients, and identify problems before they arise. And the other side of this, we said we'd look at nutrition, housing colostrum, but we also said we'd look at prolapses as well and try and understand and discuss the link between nutrition and this problem which we see in the periparturian period.
So if we look at our vaginal prolapses first. Clinical signs, we'll see external protrusion, as in this image from Nardis, it may contain the bladder, in some worst cases, it may also contain parts of the uterine body. A vaginal prolapse occurs typically prior to parturition in the last few weeks.
And the prolapsed tissue, we'll often see inflammation, swelling, we might see faecal contamination, we might see scarring or trauma, and we may well see it drying out and almost cracking a bit as well of the prolapsed tissue. In some cases It can obstruct urination, and this can lead to uremia and urine scolding of the prolapsed tissue as well. And it can be a precursor to an intestinal prolapse as well.
So correcting it early and reducing the risk is so important. Average 1% of pregnant ewes nationally suffer from a vaginal prolapse, but we know flocks that are affected may see much higher incidence rates, as high as 15 to 20% of a flock. And there's been a lot of discussion.
A lot of consideration about what causes them. And it really is a multifactorial condition. It can be affected by age, it can be affected by the number of lambs, sometimes it's simply a case of number of large lambs in utero and the increased pressure internally on the abdomen.
It can be over fat use and excessive body condition score, can be feeding too much high fibre bulky feed, and again that kind of room and fill abdomen fill. If you've got steep pasture or elevated troughs, there's work that's shown that that can increase the risk of vaginal prolapse. There is a genetic component, and I'll come to that.
If we dock the tail's too short, and if there's calcium deficiencies, that can also increase the risk of vaginal prolapse. But because there is this genetic component, 30 to 40% of ewes that have a vaginal prolapse will re-prolapse in subsequent years, so the recommendation is to cull the ewes after lambing that suffer from vaginal prolapse. In comparison The ovine uterine prolapse is a very different condition with very different causes and very different outcomes, so.
The over uterine prolapse. As vets we always focus just on the task at hand and getting it back in, but there's so much more to it than that. So we know they've got a 0.1% incident rate in the national flock, and a lot of these don't get veterinary attention, and a lot of them are culled by the farmer on farm.
And often that's probably because it's been cost prohibitive, but as the price of cull animals, the price of lambs increases, and as we understand more about the risk of this happening again in the same animal, I think there's a better economic case to attend to these. So a reminder, if we wanna get it back in. Keep it clean, clean it off, hold, tie the tail to the side if the tail is long.
We need to check for any damage to the tissue, assess for any tears, suture them if they're present in full thickness. Control any bleeding. Remove any loose placenta, but if it doesn't come away easily from the crosstaliddens, leave it in place.
Elevate the uterus, apply lubrication, and then gentle pressure with closed fists at 10:0 and 2 o'clock, working round until it returns to its normal place, and then we want to ensure full aversion. Some practical tips, particularly with the size of a U, it's quite easy to elevate the U to invert them to. That allows gravity to aid if you elevate the hind limbs.
But we don't want to leave them in that position for too long, so once we do that we have to replace the uterus as quickly as possible. I would very much advocate not to apply sugar to prolux uteruses, it creates a real nidus for infection and a site for bacteria to proliferate and thrive. We can get mini buna needles, or you can use a postmortem needle if you want to place a bona sula, and in sheep compared with cows, the uterus is more sensitive, more friable, so the risk of trauma is greater.
And actually we need to pay more attention to the medications as well, so epidural, absolutely warranted and really will make your life a lot easier in replacing. So not all local anaesthetics are licenced for cheap though, so check if it is off licence and if it is, advise an appropriate withdrawal period. And we can spike these with Xylozine as well to increase the duration and increase the analgesia.
These are inflammatory and painful conditions because of the inflammation, and that there will have been some level of trauma and exposure to the uterus, so non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, using the off licenced dose of 1 mg per gig under the skin. On replacement, where you can give 10 units of oxytocin intramuscular to aid contraction of the uterus. And a broad spectrum category D antibiotic is warranted.
Because of the risk of infection and contamination leading to rhematritis. But there's no justification based on the types of bacteria likely experienced to go straight for a category C or a combination antibiotic. A broad spectrum category D is the most appropriate option.
And we know there's the link to hypercalcemia as well, which we'll come on to talk about. So, I would always provide calcium after replacement, and oral calcium is better absorbed than subcutaneous calcium. So something providing 1.5 to 2 grammes of elemental calcium.
So if you've got a product that provides 50 grammes of elemental calcium per 500 mL, we need to give 15 mL of that product, and we can repeat that 12 hours later. A reminder on the ovine epidural. Sterile needle, 18 gauge, 1 inch is always a good place to start.
1 to 1.5 mil procaine hydrochloride, and if we want to give ylazine, then 0.1 to 0.25 mL of 2%.
Palpate for that sacred coccyal joint. Clip and prep, and as we see in this picture. It's a much shallower angle compared with cattle where we're going in perpendicular, we need 10 to 20 degree angle for sheep.
You want to advance the needle until you feel passage through the ligamentum flavium, you'll feel a, a, a light pop or a loss of pressure. Compared with cattle, the hanging drop is unreliable in small remnants, so that loss of pressure is what we're gonna feel to let us know we're in the right place. And you can bounce your syringe when you attach it to the needle, and if the liquid depresses with ease, you're in the right place.
Any level of resistance will require some redirection. We'll see it take effect within 5 to 20 minutes, and if it's just with procaine hydrochloride, we'll get about 4 hours of analgesia. But if we spike it with Xylazine, then actually we get 24 to 36 hours of analgesia.
But if we're doing this. For the uterine prolapse, then after we've replaced it, it goes back to that colostrum point. It's important, because there may be some transient ataxia from the epidural, that we ensure that those lambs receive sufficient good quality colostrum.
Thank you for listening to today's webinar, part 2 of the two-part series about care of the peripartu in you and how we maximise success as a result of nutrition, housing, feed and water access, and how that impacts colostrum, metabolic disorders, and lamb survival. Thank you very much.
