Well, good evening, or whenever you're watching this. My name's Kate Hovers. I'm a vet, been qualified for 36 years and have a passion for sheep.

I spent well over 20 years in mixed practise, mainly beef and sheep, and I work mainly with sheep and a little bit at a postmortem lab now, and a variety of other things. So I'm here talking tonight about neonatal lamb health, sort of subtitled My lambs are sick, I need antibiotics. And certainly in my time in mixed practise, I probably have prescribed or dispensed perhaps antibiotics that these days I wouldn't have done.

So I'm not here to judge anybody. I'm here to hopefully talk about my sort of passion of what was called preventive medicine a long time ago when I was at university, and it's now really called flock health schemes or flock health management. And that was part of my interest in sheet medicine, looking at flocks and preventive medicine.

So quite a lot of this is actually going to be almost common sense stuff, but really useful common sense stuff that we can talk about with our farmers and engage more and hopefully improve everybody's productivity. And we start with a few random pictures of some of my sheep at home. I'm lucky enough to live on a lovely little farm in the Brecon Beacons.

So. Moving on to the, the business, a little bit of a background. Why is it so important?

Well, as we all know, the majority of lamb losses are in the neonatal period. And the only way to make money from sheep farming are those farmers that do have the highest. Productivity.

They also have smaller inputs, probably in feed and also in replacement costs, which is another area for vets to be involved. But tonight we're talking about not losing lambs, producing robust lambs that are going to grow well, and avoiding these losses. So what are the commonest diagnosis of losses?

This is VIDA data, which is taken off postmortem, submitted to SIUC, APHA and the APHA partner providers, at which I work at one of those at Wales Veterinary Science centre in Aberystwyth. I worked there about one day a week. And as we can see, one of the commonest causes rotavirus, then we've got hypogammaglobulinemia, so really just not getting any colostrum, crypto, and then we start getting down to a bit bacterial chole septicemia.

We also have sort of clostridial diseases that could be well prevented by vaccination, turning up as significant causes of losses. These three slides I'm gonna show are from a survey, AHDB and NSA of about 350, I think it was, sheep farmers, about partly about their antibiotic use, and we can see that the majority of sheep farmers are checking their lambs for colostrum intake. Doesn't actually say how they're checking them, so it could be just they see a tail wagging and assume they're sucking well.

It could be that they're feeling the stomach, and so they are feeling a, a full belly. Hopefully a full belly, not something that's actually starting to get ill. This sort of makes me think we've probably got a fairly engaged set of farmers that have answered this, as we can see well over 50% of them are having, their vet out specifically for the sheep once or more per year.

But even with these engaged farmers, 30% of them are giving antibiotics to every lamb that's born. Others just to sick lambs and some are being a bit more selective. So some are, so we've got about a third of the antibiotics from this, a third of the lambs from these farmers get the antibiotics to hopefully prevent disease.

These are some 3 other studies as well, which are sort of showing a similar, well, a, a, a similar, perhaps maybe higher level of antibiotic use. The first study was Piers Davis at Alam Nottingham, and the references are in the notes for these as well, if you want to look them up, which is really a review of antibiotic use in sheep farms, finding that oral antibiotics prescribed to 49% of flocks. I'm really thinking 64% of the predicted lamb clock is getting what is probably supposed to be prophylactic antibiotics.

There's Neil Sargeson had a student survey showing similar levels of prophyl oral antibiotics. And the final one, it's not printed yet, but it is does seem to be I don't think I'm doing anything naughty by showing it because this is on the Shore. Site, which is the sheep health and welfare group.

You can Google them, they've got a website, the presentations that are given in their every year conference are on there, and the last year this is referenced a Nottingham University PhD with Fiona Lavas and others, and a questionnaire survey of sheep farmers supplying lamb's dead weight. So over a quarter of those farms were giving oral antibiotics to all the lambs that born. And then interestingly in red there, there was no significant difference in the productivity between the flocks that were using the antibiotics for the majority of the lambs with those that use none or for a fewer lambs.

Little plug for the sheep Veterinary Society here, those of you who are not members, it's good value, we have two conferences a year and the the by word is the friendly society. So, website there and open access on the website, down at the bottom right hand side, you can go on quick downloads to see the antibiotic policy, and I've just taken this straight out there saying currently areas where veterinary surgeons may be able to make the most impact to reduce the use of antibiotics on sheep farms. And we've got 3 whole flock antibiotic treatments for lameness.

Well, I hope we can all address that, and I think I've even done a webinar on the 5 point plan and lameness, whole flock antibiotic treatments for enzootic abortion, and we know there are effective vaccinations for prevention. Little bit of a side, I work, I've already said I work one day a week at Wales Veterinary Science centre. Well, already this year in my one day, I've had two diagnoses of enzootic abortion in submitted material from different farms that had previously treated their whole flocks with long-acting oxy tetracycline.

And I have heard of people who are treating their flocks and repeat treating them 3 or 4 weeks later. Which is not only not unsustainable, it actually works out a lot more expensive than vaccination. But what we're talking about tonight is blanket treatment of lambs against neonatal bacterial infections.

And we don't want those lambs to be going down with bacterial infections. So what I'm sort of talking about is, is how to How to have a healthy, vigorous lambs that don't, the majority don't need antibiotics. I've mentioned SOR in their report in 2018, which again is available on their website.

They've also commented about antibiotic use and whole flock treatment is rarely appropriate. And so one of the, one of the things. In the report was to encourage farmers to avoid using routine antibiotics in all their neonatal lambs.

And as we can see, sales data on oral antibiotics is being tracked. And I think we can report a good news story in that the sales data has decreased fairly significantly for oral antibiotics. So we are all engaging.

But that was just probably a bit not brief enough, but a brief background and what we're talking about tonight is how to target optimum protection. So protecting those lambs against disease. And really, it's all about the use in good body condition, and these are the areas I'm going to cover, having good new cretrition, so they will produce the best quality colostrum.

They're going to produce lambs born full of vigour that suck well and part of that is avoiding abortion as well, and stillborns and poor lambs being born. Also, obviously, there's a big place for nutrition and trace elements in that. Lambs born into a clean environment, because as we know, infection is always a balance between the protection and the challenge and also getting a good absorption of immunoglobulins in the small intestine, which is healthy, vigorous lambs and a little and some effect of trace elements.

I'm not going to talk about the microbiome, but that microbiome microbiometer that is increasing interest and work being done on this. We certainly know more from probably pigs and humans about the importance of establishment in the first few days and the long term. Effect on individuals' health almost throughout life.

That is more research and information becoming available in ruminants, but it's just another thing to make us think about is it a good idea to be putting antibiotics into neonatal gut systems. So you talk a little bit about body condition score and this really is the, the key to production. When I qualified, we talked we talked a lot about having, you know, optimal body condition at different times of the year, but we were expecting quite a lot, a loss of body condition through early lactation and making it back up again.

But more recent work, a lot of work that Leslie Stubbins has done on, on with ADAS is really showing that minimal fluctuation is important, keeping those ewes as close to a 3, 3.5, a bit less for hill ewes throughout. As much as possible.

And the weaning to mating body condition score certainly has an impact on the eight week waits. So the condition of your you and your lowland e should be 3, 3.5 pre topping.

Is actually having an effect on those 8 week and weaning weights and therefore having an effect on the health of the lamb at birth and the quality of the colostrum and milk and also not having to make up a lot of condition between weaning and mating. You want to look more into body condition and scoring and find some handouts for your farmers. There's some excellent ones on the AHDB better returns part of the website.

There's some booklets and there's a body condition scoring handouts with pictures of what you're feeling. And this reference, again, is in the notes, was looking at lom quality and found the optimum body condition score between 2.5 and 3.5.

Your nutrition, we got them in the right condition, but we also need to make sure we've got the right food for the lambs to grow and to make good quality colostrum, then milk. And the lambs, and the last few weeks, a lot of, the nutrition is going into foetal growth and making sure they've got the energy levels to get up and suck. And we know that lambs are born with poorer brown fat levels than some other species.

Trace elements also are being important, particularly cobalt and selenium that affect the lambs, the lamb you bond, their sock reflexes, and with selenium also, the immune status. There's some interesting work in the SAC booklet, the year round. Again, the references are in the notes, but the year-round feeding you for lifetime production, some very interesting work on cobalt deficiency and moving embryos from deficient to supplement use and shows just how early in pregnancy you can a deficiency can affect the sort of lamb maternal bond.

And also, if you don't have a copy download from the AHDB website, the Feeding the You manual, which was updated possibly 2 years ago now. Excellent manual and a step by step, guide to nutrition. But, personally, although I'm interested in nutrition, I can't do the people show me, oh, this is my silage analysis, this is my food, what should I feeding my ewes?

I can't answer that. I have to go away, usually with a nutrition book, think about it, in a bit of quiet time. Although I'd like to advise, but.

I can do the common sense stuff, which I think we, I, I do think we miss out on sometimes, cause you can have the best food in the world, the best silage and really sort of gold standard rocket fuel cake, but if the sheep are not off getting access to it, then, you're wasting your money on some of the sheep. So feeding types and spaces certainly, ewes need about 6 inches a head, 15 centimetres in, in modern money per e for ad lib forage and ad lib really should be fresh and regularly replenished, . Use are perhaps fussier eater than cattle.

And concentrates, this is the bit that tends to surprise people that are more used to dairy practise, that your ewe that weighs a fraction of a dairy cow still needs. This is your general lowland ewe. It's built on mules, and we do see now a lot more Texel cross, crossbred ewes, which probably have wider heads as well.

So we're talking about 18 inches of trough space per ewe, which is quite a lot. We have my trusty measuring tape. On the side, because I actually like to get that out and measure things on farms and have a little chat to the farmers then.

And on the right, we've got a picture from one of my, I have a project, to your project on Anglesey, all about reducing antibiotics in their lambing flocks by looking at nutrition, looking at colostrum, looking at lamb health. And after a meeting, I've talked a lot of About trough space. We also had a meeting with Kate Phillips, and this farmer, this pair, the shed on the right there previously was a large open shed with several round bale silage feeders in, which I had discussed the previous year, because I'm not a great fan of those and I don't think you get enough trough space and they tend to get dirty around it and foot issues.

Well, he'd really taken it on board and the next time I visited Oh, come, come and have a look at the shed, several other sheds, but he only had two that he still had round fielders, round bale feeders in. So actually with his sort of, toys on the farm, he'd cut a hole in both ends of the shed and a bit of welding and stuff beat built a central feeding passage, which I was quite surprised at, but, you know, farmers, when they understand are sort of keen, keen to make improvements where they can. I'm quite keen on feeding, bigger rolls or cobs, which can be just thrown into the floor and you don't need to worry about the trough space.

A, because the sheep take longer to eat more natural and you have to have plenty of fresh straw. It has to be, has to be, clean. But also, we can talk about, monitoring nutrition.

Metabolic profiling, taking bloods from ewes. I've said here 2 to 3 weeks before lambing, this is the ideal time to take blood from ewes in a well managed flock, because then we're just talking about fine tuning. If you've got a flock that had horrendous twin lamb the year before and you're worried about their body condition, you might want to go a bit earlier.

But generally this time, you've still got time to do a bit of fine tuning to make sure the Clostrum's right. And generally looking at your ear total protein, albumin, beta hydroxy, butyrate and calcium. So we're looking at recent and longer term protein and energy.

And there's various labs that do it. A lot of you may be doing this in your in practise lab. I also like to use Edinburgh University, dairy herd and Health productivity Service, mainly because of the excellent report you get, particularly if you send a silage analysis on what feed they're having.

The keen farmer with a picture on the right, there's a little video of him on the project on the Clostrum is Gold website, where he talks about the first year he did metabolic profiles, and the sheep were in good condition, but it came back, they were needing 100 or 150 grammes of energy more, a day. I can't remember the details, but just a little bit of fine tuning, and he's a great convert. What I also should have had, sorry, in my picture there, which I've forgotten to put, was the vet's trusty tool, little tip, if you're not used to blood testing use, I, my tool is a fan belt, so.

Getting, getting blood out of used necks, it's all down to getting them held in the right position. I and many other sheep vets like to use, not all, but like to use a fan belt, for which the fight you round the neck, the farmer will hold it in one hand, so they use strains against it a bit. Don't throttle them, but she just pulls, helps you hold the you, the other hand, he holds the head up and very slightly to one side, and that should help you bring the jugular up really nicely to find without necessarily needing to clip.

Little bit about housing, not gonna go into this in a lot of detail, but when I'm measuring, measuring feed space, always look at housing requirements as well, you might say, what's that relevant to actually lamb health. But, you know, sheep have smallish social groups, they don't always like to be too close to to others. They need to respect their social hierarchy.

And if you cram them in too tight, you're just adding to a stress level. And it's all about, you know, the summer small changes, making little changes to get everything to get those users comfortable and happy as they should be. Also, when they're on housing.

Checking the cleanliness goes without saying, plenty of fresh straw with either lime or disinfectant below. Somebody else told me this once, so I saw this at a meeting saying the way to check whether your shed is clean enough for your sheep to be lambing in it. Are you happy to take your wellies and socks off and walk across the pen?

So, I'm sorry I should have had a picture of a of a bear farmer's foot there walking across the pen, but I've missed that one. Just thinking of numbers as well, individual pens don't want to be too, too cramped or too rushed or not have time to clean them out. The recommendations are to have about 13 per 100 ewes, and that's you might find some farmers don't put their singles in there, so if it's only twins, it'd be 13 per 100 twins.

And this bit sounds such, you know, you might think why on earth is she telling me, telling us that for lamb health, you need to check that sheep have got fresh feed and clean water. But it's water is essential. Occasionally I think people might find, well, they're only in the pen for 24 hours, the 1st 24 hours, and what is milk, mainly water.

I really like the systems where you could get a pipe across the back with flowing water. A lot of people have, and there's nothing wrong with it. Small buckets on a bucket feeder, and that is great, but what height are they at?

They're at the perfect height for sheep to poo in them. So always worth having a little look, and it is a constant job, just refreshing the water in the, in the lambing pens, but something as simple as that can actually affect the use use production. Definitely like to discuss, management of individual pens because ideally they're going to be emptied and cleaned between each occupant, a occupant.

And some people do manage that, but in reality, a lot aren't. And so I try not to be too dictatorial, but try to explain that, I mean, we all know that you will get a buildup of infection the longer animals are inside in close proximity. But also what we probably don't think to explain too often about is every lamb might be passing a bit of E.

Coli or what other pathogens into the environment, but as soon as a lamb or a ewe is sick, it is passing out so much more infection. So if at least you can concentrate on completely cleaning out any pens that have had a sick animal in, or even so certainly some of my project farmers when we've talked about that, and I've been back to visit, they've had a little thinking and, and 2 or 3 of them have actually got pens in separate areas. So any of you that bought, they're fostering on, they've got the pens for those, and they've got some separate areas they they put anything that was a bit sickly in.

And this is one of my project farmers as well. This just, as of the first time I went to give a talk and we talked about the importance of cleanliness and and handling, washing hands. He went out and bought a couple of boilers, so there's always hot water available, .

I, I don't want to make it sound as like all the farmers I talk to follow all my advice. I'm just so happy with the, the really keen young farmers that really, that, that sort of seem to take notice of things I say, which, that there are, there are plenty that don't, and I'm not saying all my advice. This is even always worth taking notice of.

But this is genuine on a farm visit, he's got the antibiotic gel and he's got warm water there as well, and that's how I like to say use bedded down. I will say these ones are on the day that S4C came to Speedo. I came to film for the project, but I've visited this farm many times and it's always very clean.

And some of these buildings are quite old and traditional, so it can be done. And he has a night lamma, who, some, some nights is very busy, but he is, but the night lamer is instructed anytime it's quiet, just clean things out, particularly the individual pens. Not the most ideal of individual pens causes of wood, difficult to disinfect, but they are generally cleaned out every time.

Between, between occupants. So we've got the use in good condition, we've got the feed right, we've got, we've got the housing nice, and now we need to talk about colostrum, because that, the 1st 2 hours or few hours of the lamb's life are really setting the scene for almost its lifetime productivity. And you probably know the figures, but we talk about 50 mL per kilogramme within 2 hours and that's equating to, 250 to 290 mL per kilogramme in the 1st 24 hours, so a nice 4 kg lamb really needs a litre in its first day.

Now, most of our lambs are meat lambs reared on the mother. We're not actually measuring how much they get, . But, tho those are the areas and certainly if we're thinking of supplementing.

So we've got colostrum giving the energy to keep sucking and antibodies against disease. Ewes that haven't got enough colostrum, well, the next best thing is colostrum from another ewe. So thinking of good producing singles, letting their own lamb suck plenty, then milking it out, to store hygienically in a clean container in the fridge for 48 hours, or certainly freezing for up to a year.

So certainly during the end of lambing, when you're not, fostering on to use with good milk supply can and might have quietened down, got a bit more time, so milking out and freezing for next year. There's also, there's a little video and there was an advert in the NSA sheep farmer magazine for a sort of handheld type pump, making it easier to milk uses out. One of my farmers I do some flock health work for near me at home has bought one of these this year.

He's really trying to sort of look at getting Eu colostrum for those of his lambs that mean it. I haven't spoken to him, I meant to before today to see how we got on with it. Importantly, obviously slowly defrosting.

Nothing in the microwave of ewes milk. If you can't get used colostrum, goats is the next best. Some milking goat there are a surprising number of milking goat flock, herds, sorry, but hopefully see if they're monitored for yonis and CAE and cows, goats and cows don't have as much energy in them, and cows you're going to need a sort of at least 10% extra to give enough energy to a lamb.

Again, Yonis and TB, but also be aware that there's a rare condition where cows, individual cows may make antibodies and kill off sheep red blood cells. So your lambs will get a serious, often fatal anaemia. You can get around that by, if you can get some colostrum from some batch calving cows, mix colostrum from 3 or 4 cows, and then freeze it in smaller amounts.

And . The final one at the bottom is artificial colostrum. The next slide is going to show a little well, reference to a little study.

You need to compare the energy and very much the immunoglobulin levels. I'm remembering it's a medicine, so they are allowed some leeway into what's declared on the label. So I'll mention that more in a minute, but don't want to forget disinfecting stomach tubes.

The last thing you wanna do is a land that needs extra colostrum is put a bit of E. Coli in before the colostrum on the end of the stomach tube. If you haven't seen it already, there's the link to the Colostrum is Gold website.

And that's not ideal colostrum storage we've got there. What, one little tip I found, I do a little bit of running as well. Last year we went and bought a lot of goat's colostrum and I'd been to a trail race.

A week before where they were providing water. So I came home with two garret carrier bags full with plastic water bottles. So I was doing a little bit of recycling and finding ideal things to freeze our colostrum in.

So this is it, some of you might have seen this, it's just 3 years ago now. Murray Cork's work at Cambridge University, where they analysed 10 different colostrum supplements. None of them came anywhere near the immunoglobulin concentration of a U, which should be sort of good you 50 grammes per litre.

I don't think any of these came above 20 grammes per litre. Huge variation between them, and there was some variation between batches of the same brand. So the message there.

Was there a supplement, not a replacement. The reference at the bottom, that's, from a Swedish conference, it has been presented several times and it has been presented at Sheep Veterinary Society, that, his whole, presentation about the work is in English on that. And I, I thought it was a nice reference because there's quite a nice, presentation about anaesthesia and analgesia in sheep as well that you might find useful.

This is a very busy slide. I, it's really just there to tell you there's lots of references to show. We talk a lot about calves, there's a lot more evidence in calves, but there is evidence there to show that we can blood sample lambs to monitor the passive transfer of immunity, colostrum absorption.

And there's there's evidence to show that the ZST test, which few labs do now, but it is still available, can be correlated, and there's also evidence to show there's a positive correlation between the values from a refractometer, which many of you will have in the practise, and the ZST. So these are the refractometer. And SRUC now give a guide of over 14 compared to 20 in calves for ZST for adequate passive transfer and that's equating on a refractometer to 5 grammes per deciliter, 50 grammes per litre.

I did a little study on a couple of farms for the sheep Veterinary Society grant where I took, oh we had 170 samples from lambs, sort of 1 to 5 days old, ideally sort of 2 to 3 days old. They've got to be at least 24 hours for the absorption and less than 7 days when they're making other proteins and immunoglobulins of themselves. So out of those, I found a very small number where they didn't agree, and I was going with a guide of over 20, whereas we now suggest over 14.

And there's one reference in your notes that actually has a slightly lower level, for your total protein as a guide as well, but I was happy to go with the upper level. Little tip about blood testing lambs, I find them easier than use actually, but again, it's all down to the handler. This was from the project, so if they come into the practise, laying them on a table can be, can be good, otherwise holding them up.

Supporting them round so they're not dangling too much, but holding the neck straight, but the head slightly extended. And we've got there, that's where the vein is. You can very happily get your thumb round into the jugular groove, and you can't see it there, but there's usually a great vein.

Some people will click up as well. I generally find them quite nicely. I've, you know, when I started blood testing lambs, I was surprised how straightforward it is to find a vein quite often, .

There we go. So, a little bit of a slide on testing Colostrum. We've got, so, and some farmers are doing it.

One of certainly one of my project farmers is doing that, and we are comparing blood samples from the lambs, and the lambs are good and the colostrum is very high. They're on sort of almost rocket fuel, really good colostrum in in the sheep, and they're really at the high end. There's certainly evidence for using refractometers, and bricks refractometers and colostromators in cows, where they give a cutoff of 22%, 50 milligrammes per mL in the colostrum, and this is a picture showing level for calves, but you certainly have a higher fat and protein content of their colostrum.

There is some work on dairy use suggesting that using a refractometer is useful, but there was a cer certainly a presentation at the September Sheep Veterinary Society conference that was questioning the usefulness and actually measuring immunoglobulins and comparing them. So it's a little bit of a, of a watch this space. And we sort of, we've talked about nutrition, using body condition and the Colostrum, so we've covered the getting the protection into those lambs and getting healthy, well-protected lambs born.

Now we're a little bit onto the reducing the challenge and the dealing with problem side. So hygiene, it's sheep, the environment, which we've talked a little bit about, and the shepherds as well. So lambs sort of need sights of a clean udder, that's how I often put it, and that's a picture I took yesterday actually of a few sheep in our shed and we Some people winter shearing that was very popular, seems to have gone out of fashion a little bit, although I know people still do.

Winter shearing has the advantage that food intake, sort of increases. Your stocking density can be slightly higher, but obviously they need at least 6 weeks' growth and to go out. Into good shelter.

And in fact, where I live up in the Brecon Beacons would probably be fairly inappropriate because we get a fairly biting wind, even in the summer sometimes. But what, well, we, it's not me that does it, but what we call crutching or dagging, removing the wool from around the rear end and the tail, because those are sort of the dirtiest areas. And there's nothing like a convert because my partner, the sheep farmer, doesn't like to think, well, he does, does follow some some of my advice, but he is so convinced that the of the effect this has on stopping any watery mouth in our lambs that he now thinks it was his own idea and preaches to everybody at market about what they should be doing.

Certainly several, several of my farmers, do, and farmers all over the country, I, I'm sure do and look at that. Some people are a little bit concerned. Does that increase the risk of mastitis?

Well, it might increase the risk of the udder getting exposed to the elements and cold wind, but it decreases the risk of the udder being exposed to sort of dirt and muck off the tail. And we certainly know one mastitis risk is the cleanliness of the environment, as well as how long sheep are sheep are housed. And mention the environment then, because of course the hygiene of the sheep is affected by the cleanliness of where they are and whether that's inside or outside.

I'm talking a lot about assuming indoor lambing, but it's, it's much the same for outdoor lambing and actually things like nutrition, body condition scoring and metabolic profiling are at least as important because it's probably more difficult to to assess how much nutrition they're getting from grass. So, thinking of outside, it sort of has a sort of perfect green environment, and we need to make sure it is that, not just mud and that there is shelter available. And we've, I've already talked about the cleanliness of individual pens, making sure that Colostrum is kept hygienically, but also sort of the pen as well.

We think a lot about the individual pens where the lambs are reared, but obviously we know that where you've got a large pen and they use a lambing, a lot of them were lamb in the same area. They usually like to go to the back and to the quarter, a corner. So if any of them are carrying any disease, and we do think Streptococcus discoactia joint, we may have carrier ewes.

So if, if one of those ewes has landed in an area and several more go and sniff and sit down in the same area and their lambs are born there, you can be increasing the risk. So making sure there's plenty of clean straw and disinfecting in the big pens as well. I've always already talked about sort of thinking about separate pens for sick animals isolation or at least just making sure they're really cleaned out well afterwards.

Hygiene of the shepherds, so yes. Wearing gloves. Again, I admit I didn't use to wear gloves for lamming lambing, so I didn't really like it.

I didn't think about it. I am good now, I do always wear gloves. I have thought more about sort of the hygiene aspects.

And, and that's both for lambings as a vet, although I'm not in a lot of clinical practise now, but. Clear home because what do we do? We lammer you, then we put our finger in the lamb's mouth to get it to suckle.

We feel the ewesoder, and then we go and then we go to look at another lamb and make that sort of suckle on somewhere. So if we've got gloves, they're easier to clean or just take them off and put another pair on. Washing and disinfected hands, and the hand gels, I, I would think from the farms I deal with them a little project on Anglesey, I was, was expecting to see sales of hand gels going up at the same rate, sales of oral antibiotics are going down.

They're cheap, they're less than a quid from the supermarket. You put them in a pocket and just use them every time you've lambed you, handled a lamb. And again, it's explaining to our, our, our farmers.

They know, but are not thinking, particularly when we're there and when we're busy, not really thinking about, yes, every time you put your finger in a lamb's mouth or feel a use oder or get a lamb to suck on or clear the mucus from a, a, a, a lamb that you've just lammed, what's actually on your hands that you can be given it before it gets its colostrum. Oh, I don't know what I did there. But also reducing, I'm talking about, you know, getting the health right so we don't need to give antibiotics to everything, but to decrease the challenge for the healthy, good colostrum lambs, we don't want any of them to be getting disease because what's happening as soon as a lamb is scouring, it's multiplied that amount of, whether it's rotavirus or E.

Coli, by a huge percentage. So, so, and particularly where you've got clients that have been using antibiotics routinely to almost anything, this is the time to be sitting down and thinking about targeting to those that are at more risk of disease. So lambs outside the ideal weight range, and, these are, you can get these off AHDB QMS.

Or or HTC, the ideal weights. These are for, you know, commercial lambs, so lowland ewes with terminal ye lambs and singles between 4.5 and 6, twins 3.5, 4.5, triplets still greater than 3.5.

And hill or true mountain sheep lambs would certainly be expected to be 1, 1.5 kilogrammes less than that. But the very big lambs, particularly the singles, can be as much risk as the very small ones cos they can often have sort of a slow birth and be very slow to be up and going.

Triplets more likely to be at risk, particularly the last lamb born, cause the first one or 2 may well have already had a bit of the Colostrum, or particularly if you're taking one off to foster it on or put it over rear artificially. Poorer uses, youths that have been unwell or in poor body condition, or we know their colostrum isn't gonna be as good. Or just later in lambing, and particularly if it's been a wet winter, and even inside, bedding is getting a bit damp or straw is getting a bit tight, or you've had bad weather and sheep are being kept in for a bit longer, so you might decide to target some antibiotic use to the last lambs born, just to stop them building up the amount and spreading to the rest.

But I sort of started this with saying, oh, my subtitle it, my lambs are sick, I need antibiotics, which is, you know, which is a conversation or a phone call that does get relayed to us. So I was gonna have some poll questions, but I've got a bit confused between poll questions and Q&As, so I haven't done the poll. But I was gonna ask at the beginning, how do you respond to that, you know, gen.

Genuinely, do you just prescribe them? Do you insist they have a visit? Do you book it?

Do you insist they speak to a vet on the phone and then maybe prescribe? Do you try and get them into a consult? Do you insist on, or do you encourage or insist on having some sampling?

And then I was a bit later going to have a poll as in, well, what would you actually like to do and see if they're the same. But then, yeah, so we got that. I mean, the ideal thing, I would have said is, is to have a visit, that gives us the opportunity, and I think I'm about to have a slide that covers all this with some pretty pictures, so I'm sorry you're looking at a white blank, I know it's a bit naughty putting up some slides with some.

Pretty cheap pictures. But, you know, lambing time is very busy. It's the one kind of times when it's often a bit easier to push the farmers into, well, not push them that suggest a visit.

And yeah, because time out coming into the vets is time that lambs could be being born, moved, turned out, and all that sort of thing. And on a visit, we can assess so many things. But first of all, the lambs are sick, I need antibiotics.

Well, do they? How do we know? .

They certainly going to need fluids, sort of, you know, oral rehydration fluids or extra milk if they're digesting. Certainly water mouth oral electrolytes cause they're not gonna digest milk if they're scouring, keep, you know, we want the milk for the energy and lambs need energy, so even for watery mouth, I try and get the The guts moving again and get some milk in as soon as possible, or else they're going to be dying of hypothermia and starvation due to not getting the energy. And then they also need a bit of TLC.

They need to be kept warm. If lambs are cold, then they need so much more food to keep them warm. And so if they're ill and cold, they're they're sort of on a bit of a sticky wicket already.

I've already shown this slide, you might have noticed, as you're awake will notice you've seen this before. And again, my lambs need antibiotics. Well, we've got rotavirus, we've got just lack of colostrum, we've got crypto.

Now antibiotics aren't going to affect those. Having said that, a lot of those, you will get an eco, an opportunist E. Coli coming in as well on the damage.

Rotavirus in lambs is usually not the same strains as in calves and you don't get cross strain protection. So giving colostrum from cows that have been vaccinated against rotavirus doesn't necessarily help. Although again, in one discussion group I had, one of the farmers did that after he'd had rotavirus, diagnosed all his twins, let them suck, gave them 2 hours, and then stomach tubed them with cow colostrum that had been vaccinated, and he said it stopped the problem.

And fair enough, he's a keen, keen. Sheep farmer, and he stood up there and he said, it stopped the problem, but I have no idea whether it was due to the rotavirus vaccination or just I was giving them more colostrum. And we had a great discussion group, so we had a little bit of a chat about that, and that's actually how my project got born in the first place, looking at colostrum and decreasing antibiotics.

Crypto, possibly increasing increasing numbers, and we know this can affect. It's also zoonotic, quite unpleasant in people, and antibiotics don't kill it off. Nothing licenced for lambs, the calf treatments can be used off licence.

I would suggest, if you haven't used them before, speaking to the manufacturers, they could give you some guidance and being very careful about measuring it out because there's a very narrow range between being effective and being toxic and killing them, particularly if animals are dehydrated. But then we are getting some, some some diseases that antibiotics are appropriate for as well. So yeah, this is the slide I thought I was on when I was showing you a bit of blank white.

So, lambs are sick. Some of them might need antibiotics, and certainly we don't want to be withholding treatment. But if we can get a visit, then that is an opportunity to look at all these things we've talked about housing, the uses, and maybe, you know, another factor for a visit maybe, well, you know, I can come, I can take some samples to see if we can get the right antibiotics, and I can blood sample some lambs to see if they're getting the right amount of Colostrum.

Cause if we sort of slightly flick back to this and we look at diseases from clostridial disease, we do need to remember, perfectly preventable by vaccination, but the vaccine has to go into a healthy ewe at the right time. That ewe has to produce good colostrum, and the lamb has to suck good colostrum quickly for it to get the protection. So it's not just the actual, you know, bottle of vaccine that does it.

Postmortems on farm can be useful to do and and even encouraging farmers to do their own postmortems, I've done a few sessions on that. And it's quite often an eye opener, and it's a really good way to get over to, to, to, to some farms about the importance of losston. Picture here of how kidneys should look with their fat cover.

I should have bought some pictures from, my job in the lab because we use, a lot of lamp postmortems this time of day, there'll be kidney with Little or no fat cover. Farmers can do that very easily and also open the stomach and see if it is full of milk with a really good cottage cheese milk clot. And if it's not, there's an issue.

Now that issue may be the lamb's unwell for another reason and not sucking, but it's the best visual picture to show whether, you know, whether indeed milk is going into the stomach. I, you know, and I've covered these other things. If we're not doing postmortems, then at least getting some samples, faeces for a scour package, which includes a basic culture and sensitivity, so it will include, E.

Coli and sensitivities. We do tend to see, resistance in. Colis, particularly to perhaps spectinomycin and neomycin.

It's not quite a guess which oral antibiotic has been used on this farm. That's a little bit flippant, but we do know we get resistance to the commonly used oral antibiotics in in in some or a number of E. Coli isolates.

Little bit, I'm gonna talk about joint Hill now before I sort of, finish off about what else to do next. Because joint Hill, always think, what do we know? Well, we don't know enough.

in, in the references, there's also a reference to an in practise. Review article, review paper I did several years ago in UK Vet, which I found really interesting because I was looking up these references from 1920 and 1925 when there was some research done, and there's not been an awful lot of done since then, which, and that was when streptoscalactia was named. We know, puts also from some more recent stuff, that Strep can survive on clean straw for several weeks, and it can survive in the water.

So cleanliness isn't gonna completely prevent it. Infection can go by mouth or via the navel, so naval dressing really important, and there's probably some carrier uses. Probably not an awful lot cos the work that Anne Riddler and her PhD students did at the RVC.

Didn't isolate it all that often, but the work in the 20s and the 1920s did manage to give lambs joint ill by injecting them with stuff from ewes he thought were carriers, and also by rubbing it on sort of castration tail docking wounds as well. So we do know that we can find it in flocks with good basic hygiene, but the enhanced hygiene that reduces the risk of things such as using gloves during assisted lambing, washing the hands between assisted lambings, changing the bedding or disinfect and all, and really disinfecting all individual pens between occupants and being rigorous about disinfecting. Stomach tubes between lambs.

And I use and I talk to my farmers, encourage them to use just baby bottle disinfectant stuff. You can make it up as cold steriliser, wash the tubes, and again, not washing them in boiling water, you need to wash them out with warm water or else you can almost bake bits of milk onto it. So washing out with warm soapy water, flush them through and then put them in the baby bottle steriliser.

The other thing, the RVC work, they did grow 25 isolates of streptocoactia from various cases, all of which were resistant to oxy tetracycline. So treatment of choice still remains penicillins, penicillin's, Little or no resistance and anti-inflammatories, whether you use corticosteroids as generally favoured by sort of Phil Scott Aal or you might be happier with non-steroidals. Whatever.

I think it's really important to give anti-inflammatories, maybe a bit of pain relief because these are arthritic joints, they're really painful. We also know with arthritis, you need to keep moving it. And if those lambs don't move and they're in too much pain, they're not gonna suck and then their energy levels will go down and their body's natural immune system will go down and you're in a vicious circle.

One of the, this will be another phone question you get. I've got loads of joint till, penicillin isn't working. I want a stronger antibiotic.

It's rarely that, I mean, certainly, it's worth doing a joint tap or sending for a postmortem an untreated animal. It's far less likely to be resistant to penicillin as that there's such, such changes, such aggressive changes in the joint and build up of sort of puss and necrotic material before the antibiotic is given. So you can get some quite severe changes when you've just got a slightly lame animal.

So we've had, we've had our phone calls, we've maybe managed to do a visit and hopefully got some results, so we know whether we've got problems that do need addressing with antibiotics. And hopefully, we've found a few things going on that we can give some. Advice, add a few things together, sort of, you know, the summer small improvements, but really important about following up.

I mean, yes, I'm trying, I, I don't mean to be patronising, but trying to remind you to do this, but I know I've been guilty of not doing this in the past. Yeah, probably we're always meant to follow up with a phone call a week later, see how things are, and then get sort of distracted by all the other lammings, carvings, whatever, even dreaded TB testing. But if we can do reminders, it's a lot easier these days when you can have a smartphone that will remind you to do a reminder.

Calling in going past just to assess the progress and also setting the reminders for next year. Now I do a bit of consultancy and I'm not rushing around firefighting all the time, I find it a lot easier. I'm certainly, I, I think the.

Maybe younger generation are better prepared or helped to be proactive and maybe a bit better business minded. I've not been very very good in the past at saying to people, yes, I've got to come and visit, you've got to pay me. But as I get older and I get sort of, I'm not sure whether I'm better at it, but just make myself do more.

We're not saying you have to have a visit, just offering and being quite upfront about what it's going to cost and how you think it's going to help them be more productive and thinking about the things we've talked about doing body condition scoring, metabolic profiling. Certainly back to my project on Anglesey, 7 very keen farmers. Most of them are making good money out of sheep, and certainly 3 of them absolutely know their cost of production, and they would pay for metabolic profile.

They're keen now paying for a visit, to have a few lambs checked at the start of lambing for their sort of colostral absorption, just to know it's going all right and have the confidence not to be giving everything, everything oral antibiotics. And then, and I do go with my little tape measure as well. .

And so these are various things to to cover. And I, I expect you've heard of healthy young stock and there we go, we had this keep Britain's young stock healthy. Many of you may have engaged with that, and although it's not quite the same, a lot of that is, is relevant, and we have more lambs than than we have calves and, Most of our sheep, not all, but a lot of our sheep, it's meat production.

You know, lambs are still important for, for the dairy because the, the meat from the lambs and your replacements is important. So if you're not producing your good lambs, then the ewe isn't producing at all. So we should be looking at keeping our our young stock lambs healthy as well.

And some of you may be doing that, but think, I hope this will perhaps just make you think about doing some kind of practise package or what you're doing, maybe adding it on to flock health clubs. Very I'm probably out of time or overrunning. Last couple of slides, a little bit about engaging with farmers.

I've certainly altered the way I engage with farmers over the years. I think with confidence, I'm much less dictatorial. I'm much, I'm obviously, I'm older, so they think I've got a bit of confidence, or they think I might have learnt something by now.

Now I'm, I love talking to farmers, I love doing discussion groups, and I'm quite upfront that I expect to learn from them, as well as them learning from me. And my motivational interviewing, there's been some work at Bristol. I got interested by a short, presentation at the BVA Animal Welfare Foundation a couple of years ago and last year.

Any of you that BCVA members and haven't seen them, another plug for Webinar vet, that is an introductory webinar to MI and it's free for BCVA members. I certainly recommend watching that, and it's talking about engaging, not lecturing. There's been some work from Scandinavia and Denmark called it, they call it the stable school methodology, where they have a bit like our discussion groups, and this is my lovely discussion group and project farmers from Anglesey, but a little bit about .

Farmers' groups where the vet is the facilitator, we're not there to tell people what to do or even necessarily in those groups, the Danish groups, to actually give specific advice. It's a farmers' group, they meet on one farm, they discuss what a certain disease or other management issues, have a bit of a farm walk, and. They discuss it between themselves, and they come become to thinking of different things they may do.

And as the vet is there to be asked questions and maybe just facilitate the meetings. And there's been research showing about that's a really good way to engage and a really good way for people to alter behaviours. I just pulled this off, the, well, actually off the Noah, it's, it's on the back of the, the data sheet things, but it's, the animal medicine's best practise, there's some farmer training on the NOAA website about responsible antibiotic use for different types of farms, .

They have, they have to pay for it, it's not that expensive. It also says coming soon, a vet resource centre that will include materials the vet practises can be used. I I did just check a couple of days ago, it isn't there yet, but that might be a useful resource for the future.

So I think I'm probably a minute over time, so, and I've been very good about not going off too much of a tangent, so I'm going on too much about sheep cos I could talk about them forever. But summary, neonatal lamb health really depends on getting you using good body condition, getting the nutrition right for good quality colostrum, getting your. Lambs born full of vigour that suck well, born into a clean environment, and if we're going to use antibiotics, target it at the small number of animals to need it.

And we can help with all of this. And so we could build it into the flock health package so that we can keep Britain's young lambs healthy too. And there we go Questions.

I'm not live online at the moment, so I think you're gonna have to email any questions in and I can send them back to you. Ah, thanks so much, Kate, that was fab. Thank you.