What a bummer - how to care for an orphan lamb

First time Ewe, three years old, had twins.  I finally get her in the jug with her two lambs and she freaks out.  Butting and stomping on the lambs.  The larger lamb, can stand on his own, but two hours after 'hatching', the smaller lamb can't stand, is shivering and lethargic.  She accepts the larger lamb (for the most part) but she is dead set against the smaller one.  I managed to restrain her long enough for each lamb to get a good feed.  Both, including the weakling got a long feed from mummy at about 2 hours of life.

After 4 hours, it's obvious she won't take to the little lamb and it's getting to the point where it's still not able to stand or respond well to stimuli, so we bring it in the house to warm up.  

We have a bummer.  (orphan lamb)

I know it's very important to get the yummy mummy in the lamb as it's full of all sorts of goodies to help it grow strong.  But will one feed do it?  I don't think I can milk this ewe as she's too stressed out.  I only have a tiny amount of first milk in the freezer.  

Also, I don't know much about caring for a bummer.  Any advice would be appreciated.  

Looking forward to a night with no sleep.  I gave it a small feed of formula and now it's sleeping.  I would rather it had goats or sheep milk, but that's not in the budget... although, I might try milking the friendly ewe, she's got massive udders and her single is 4 weeks old.  She might have some to spare.

Need to find out how much formula/milk to give it as I understand I shouldn't give too much.  It's got one hell of a voice, but at 8 hours of life, it still cannot stand on its own.  But at least it's not shivering anymore.  

When I have a bottle lamb, I try to get it at least one feed of colostrum before it is 24 hours old, after which time its stomach loses the ability to absorb the antibodies in colostrum (begins producing stomach acids which degrade the antibodies). I start a bottle lamb on goats milk, usually getting the cans of condensed goats milk at the grocery store that you have to dilute with water.  Heat it to 103 degrees F before feeding.  After 2 weeks on goats milk, I will gradually transition over to lamb milk replacer over a period of several days. Start feeding 1/3 cup every 4 hours, gradually increasing the amount as the lamb grows.  To get an idea of how much to feed at a sitting, you can feel the lamb's belly to see how full it is, comparing it to the fullness of other lambs that are feeding normally from mom. I start them initially on goats milk because it is easier to get them to drink it than milk replacer, once they are taking the bottle well, then I slowly switch to milk replacer.

See if another ewe will take it on. If not you can bottle feed goat milk or milk replacer.

There are all sorts of videos and blogs on how to do this.



Good Luck!

no experience with lambs but we have raised several bummer goats. we keep vitamin paste around and first couple of bottles have cultured butter in them(couple of table spoons) if we have extra goats milk they can get some  of that but we've raised them on stores bought milk with no problems.

Ideal would be to attach it to another nurse mom. You can slather the baby in another nursing mom's milk and she may accept her as her own. Otherwise, I've had great success with milk replacer as directed.

You are all so kind to post such helpful advice. Thank you all. It certainly helps in a situation like this, to feel like you're not alone. I'm sure R Ranson is doing all she can for the little lamb and I'm sure she's working tirelessly. We hope all turns out well.

Thanks everyone for you kind words and advise.

Little lamb is doing well.  Sleeping a lot.  She can stand now, walk forwards-ish, and fall over.  She isn't eating as much as the bag of formula says she should at this age, but she is TINY!  About the same weight as a 2 ltr jug of milk.  Never seen a lamb so small before.  Her sister is about the weight of 4 ltrs of milk.  

Last night she slept through the night, but I didn't.  Waking up every few minutes listening for her.  So Tired.

Her mum, Not A Goat (so named because someday she might stop acting like a goat, walking on her hind legs, trying to climb fences, being a goat) is still caring for the bigger lamb.  She opened the (locked!) gate to the jug and joined the rest of the flock early, but freedom agrees with her as she's much calmer now and won't leave the side of the new lamb.

Hello R Ranson

  Keep it warm and hopefully you have good nurse reflex on the orphan lamb.  I am feeding 3 right now and they get about a 700 ml bottle 4 times a day split between them.

 So that's not  much more then 200 ml 4 times a day.

Heat pad if you have it inside. Hopefully it gets to walking normally, because it's small it might come with some extra problems

This is probably too late, but it might be useful in the future.  It's not really how to raise a bummer lamb, but how to avoid raising a bummer lamb.  And this is just regurgitated book learning, though I have done it with cows.  If the ewe won't accept her lamb, put her in some sort of head catch (within the jug) so that she (1) is totally contained and (2) cannot see behind her.  Hopefully, when she is released after a day or two (having been fed and watered with her head in the catch), she will smell the previously-unwanted lamb, and thus smell her own milk having gone through it, and realize "Oh, this must be my lamb."

I know I'm coming in a little late, but I wanted to throw in my two cents. Right now I am feeding 2 bummer lambs and I have fed a few others over the years. As far as getting mom to accept a twin that she rejected, I 've never been successful. I usually can get at least one feeding of colostrum from mom, but I have a Jersey milk cow so I always have colostrum on hand in the freezer which I use on the lambs for the first 24 hours. From there, I start them on lamb milk replacer until they are "over the hump" at which time I start replacing half with raw Jersey milk. Eventually, I switch over to all Jersey milk (high fat!) until weaning. I've often read that you should not feed cow's milk to lambs, but I think I have been quite successful using it because of the high milk fat in Jersey milk.

Also late to the party but here in the UK and Ireland one method for avoiding a bummer is to find a ewe who loses her lamb, skin the dead one and wrap it round the bummer like a little lamb coat. Put the dressed up bummer in with the lamb less ewe and hopefully she accepts. Grizzly but I have heard many good reports of this method with many different breeds

She's got the yellow runs.  Not good.

She's not eating as much as the book says she should for her age.  I wonder if I can figure out how much to give her by her weight.  

Otherwise, still gaining size and strength.  Today she managed to jump and play.  But also sleeping most of the time.  

Sticky, yellow poop is normal early on. It can happen because they get a bit too much colostrum or rich milk. We had to wash the back end of the little ewe with soap and water because it got pretty gross! And my lambs eat less than the bag of milk replacer says they should, but they are a smaller breed than the big commercial wool lambs.

Her poop was getting to be almost liquid and projectile.  So I ended up following the advice I found here which also corresponds to what other shepherds have told me.

For my lambs, they were given one-half (1/2) chewable tablet of Pepto-Bismol (off brand, remember!) a day. Now, for baby animals, you have to grind up the tablets into fine powder and feed it to the baby a little at a time, gently swiping your finger across the tip if it’s tongue to moisten your finger so the powder will stick, and then putting your finger back into the baby’s mouth and rubbing the powder on its tongue.  

What the site didn't say is how much the lamb would like pepto-bismol powder.  

The poo is starting to stiffen now.  More like a runny goo.  

If the mother rejects a lamb, in my experience it is because she can tell that it is unhealthy and will not live anyway. That being said, it does not mean that I still do not try, and do everything I can to make it live. I just don't feel bad if they do pass on because the odds were really against me anyway.

The answer to feeding colostrum to a lamb is tube feeding. I tube feed a lot, and it really has lowered my mortality rate, down to almost zero now. This can be as simple as warming up a lethargic lamb and putting it back with the Ewe, or one on a bottle until weaning time. Tube feeding is fast and easy, gets warm milk into its core NOW...and gives it the nutrition the lamb needs to kick start the lamb into life. There is nothing to be scared of, anyone can do it, just make sure it does not go into the lungs. Stretching the lambs neck out, and letting it swallow the tube is the trick.

Your lamb now has scours which can be life threatening. It can come from a variety of places; feeding too much milk, to just being a sick lamb which is why the ewe rejected it anyway. When they get scours (diarrhea) I stop giving it milk, and switch to electrolytes only, feeding by tube if the lamb will not bottle feed from the new tasting stuff. You can also use Gatorade or Pedialyte, but takes more of it. Wait for 24 hours to see if it clears up. If not, give Imodium AD and keep giving it electrolytes.

She was far noisier overnight!  3 am, for half an hour.  Back to her loud self again.  

There is far less poop today.  Hardly any.  She also has a lot more energy.

I take her with me every time I go outside with the idea that she might socialize to the other animals (and I hope the sheep) and get some exercise.  She loves it, but is difficult to photograph. She's either too close or too active to get a good picture.

She also needs a name.  It's a G-year and we already have a Gertrude.  It has to be a word she likes and responds to, but she won't respond to any of the G-words we can think up.  It doesn't have to be a girls name, it can be an object or any word that starts with a G.  It doesn't even have to be English.  The closest word she responds to is moggie (not a g-word, although she says it is).

Name her Grace (or Gracie). You've been working hard "saving Grace" and her name could reflect that.

I'm glad she's showing an improvement.

I'm so glad she's doing better!

How about "Gabbie" sounds a bit like "Moggie"? I like Gracie, too.

Piggybacking off your thread Ranson, but I have a bottle lambb(my first as well) about the same age and I've run into a problem I hope we can solve.

This is her fourth morning and starting ladt night she's become very disinterested in the bottle/nipple.

This morning she was shoving on me with her head the way she does when she's hungry... But she rejects the nipple. I managed to get her to nurse a little bit by forcing it into her mouth, but she quickly quit.

Seems more lethargic than the last two days as well.

What are you feeding her?  

I find if I mix the formula up too far ahead they refuse it.  

Also, the style of nipple makes a huge difference.  Don't know why, but if I use a new nipple or clean their nipple too well, they forget that's where milk comes from.  Must be the smell.

So this guy is 3 days old. Born in the middle of the night in a snow storm, and his mom was scared off by our young LGD.  I found him in the morning hunkered down by the heat lamp at the chicken coop, or he would've been frozen stiff like his cousin.  I got him a few shots of colostrum, and have been feeding him a blend of his mom's milk and formula while keeping him warm inside.  Likely fighting off pneumonia,  but he's doing amazingly well. I've been bringing him out to his mom to try to get him to match with her again. Poor buddy thinks I'm his mom though. Mom is more than happy to let him nurse, still baaing after him and calling for him. But he just doesn't know where his milk comes from. Would love more advice on getting him to disassociate with me and associate with his mom's utter.

r ranson wrote:What are you feeding her?

Raw goat milk.

The of nipple makes a huge difference.  Don't know why, but if I use a new nipple or clean their nipple too well, they forget that's where milk comes from.  Must be the smell.

Standard yellow and red lamb/goat nipples. Forgetting wasn't the issue for me, I got her to take a tiny bit then she just No Selled the bottle.

She started getting finicky about it last night and here we are at 8:30 in the morning and she hasn't fed since 10pm despite my best efforts.

Her stomach feels full but not tight and I have not noticed any poo in 24 hours.

Awesome local farm vet is on vacation and urged us to rush her to the average local vet.

I will report back with the diagnosis.

Sooo vet thinks it's Abomasitis and is prescribing antibiotics. I asked about alternatives with a decent chance of resolving the issue and he says there isn't one.

Any alternative treatments would be appreciated. (I'm willing to antibiotic, but I consider it a last resort)

It was cold this morning when she came outside with us to help do the morning chores, she was shivering.  By chance, I remembered that a friend had left old baby clothes at our place to go to the Second-Hand shop.  I took the smallest onesie and put it on the lamb.  It's a loose fit and the lamb loved it.  This garment was for a 6-week premature human child and it fits loosely on the lamb!  Such a tiny lamb.  So cute.

Kyrt Ryder wrote:Sooo vet thinks it's Abomasitis and is prescribing antibiotics. I asked about alternatives with a decent chance of resolving the issue and he says there isn't one.

Any alternative treatments would be appreciated. (I'm willing to antibiotic, but I consider it a last resort)

How is it going?  

Not eating is bad, but not terrible.  How is the waste management system?  Poo and pee
I looked up abomasitis.  It looks like it means 'swollen tummy' but is a collection of symptoms rather than a single cause.  

Here she is, all dressed up and ready to play.



I just spent an hour with the sheep and she just won't interact with them.  I'm worried she won't learn that she is that species.  

We also had triplets (or possibly 4, I'll know more soon) born today.  The smallest one was twice the size of this.  


Question:  She was 'hatched' on Sunday.  But she's still not big enough or strong enough for me to put the elastic on her tail.  She's a very woolly breed so I think docking her is a good idea even if I hate to do it.  

First time posting, hope i'm doing it correctly and I hope this isn't too tardy....

Back in the 80s, on Saturdays I worked for a horse vet and one day he brought in a bum lamb to euthanize and the other vet and I decided that since he was suckling our finger, he had potential.  Doc shook his head and asked if I knew what that entailed.  I didn't.  I've since retired from the govt and become a certified veterinary technician, but I knew NOTHING back then.

So we got a soda bottle with the coolest black nibble that fit over the soda bottle, I got Lambda at the feed store, and I fed Governor Lamb every 4 hours for 6 weeks I think.  I was working fulltime but close to home and for the Govt, who was sympathetic. It went:  midnight,  4am, 8am (dash to work), (dash home) noon feeding (dash back to work), (dash home) 4pm feeding (dash back to work), 8pm, and we're back to midnight!

My chum, who raised lambs for food, visited right away and told me all the foibles with raising a bum lamb (they give up easily, like to be cuddled, and now you need to find a home for him with other sheep, "he can't come to my place").

The first night I put him in the bathtub with lots of bedding and he started a horrible sound that was nowhere near a BAAAAAAAA, more like a HONKKKKKKK.  So I wrapped him up in a big beach towel, brought him to bed, and laid him on my chest, he immediately fell asleep.  The husband at the time rolled over and said Is that lamb in our bed?  Yes.  Oh.Well, ok.

I housed him in our suburban neighborhood in a big dog house I filled with straw and changed every day.  He followed me everywhere, including into the house to fix his meals.  He learned stairs, how to not eat the hanging house plants if I yelled No Governor at him, and we kept stacks of towels around and when he would assume the telltale position, one of the four of us would yell PEE TOWEL and someone close would toss the towel underneath him in time to catch the stream.  The marbles?  Well we just dealt with it.  rockpaperscissors for who had to clean up each particular scatter of pellets!

He was pure black and hilarious.  Doc neutered him down the road (with anesthesia...he begged me not to tell ANYONE he'd done that but I was having none of the other methods), vaccinated him for all the required stuff.

The every 4 hour feedings went to every 6, then eventually to every 8.  He lived in his outdoor dog house after about the first couple days.  We had a big fenced backyard that he quite liked until he didn't - which manifested with him baaing nonstop if he was alone.  He needed a flock.  

I found a petting farm near my office in rural Arvada and she and her vet husband took him in.  The last time I visited him he was 13 years old.  I THINK he knew me.......

While I know every newborn animal has the potential to add to the bottom line,the attention these bottle lambs need seems the antithesis of the permie ideal of getting the livestock to do the work for you.
I'm not suggesting that I would do anything other than try to save a bummer, but I am asking is it worth doing,economically?
In a fiber flock, I would think so.
For meat?  Maybe?
For  breeding,almost certainly not,given that bummers seem to be mosty sickly .
The economics of   saving them for milking seem iffy for the same reason.
Clearly there  isn't much meat on these tiny cuties,so if there is a market for "suckling lamb", they are not gonna return much of anything.
So the economics of raising a bottle lambs seem bleak, but still the better choice.

Yay for cutie lambkins!

This is the age old question: Do you save a bummer or just let them go?

In New Zealand, they go on vacation during lambing season letting those that live...live, and those that don't...die. Their thoughts are, over time the genetics of the flock just gets better. That has its place, and is well meaning, but easier to do on a farm with 5000 sheep because a person will recover from the losses after the first few years. On a smaller farm like mine, it is MUCH, much harder because every lamb represents a potential sale.

But even on a meat sheep farm, Cornell University has an Excel program that proves (and allows a farmer to determine if) a bummer is a money maker. Generally speaking, milk replacer is not all that expensive. (I never call the Vet though, that just does not make much sense)

The biggest reason I am an advocate of trying to save bummers though, is because I have learned so much doing so. This has not only allowed my farm to go from a 40% mortality rate, but now down to 1%. I have literally saved hundreds of lambs because I know what to do when they are sick. And now that I teach about sheep farming, that knowledge based gets passed on to other sheep farmers, and of course what is passed on here. So really the number is pretty huge, just because I taken the try-to-save-the-lamb road.

Another aspect I will tread lightly around, but do need to mention, is that this may conflict with some people's religion. It does mine. I feel I need to take care of my livestock the best that I can.

Thank you for that thoughtful reply.
I understand the moral aspect of animal care.
I hand fed a 4 year old hen,in an attempt to nurse her back to health. She was hardly a producer of eggs but she was my gardening conspirator,and my charge.
When I failed to heal her, I took her life,the first life I have taken with my own hands. It was a relief, I felt I finally done right by her.
She was too sick to eat, so she's feeding a tree now.

Even though she costs more than a regular lamb to feed, I'm getting loads of good stuff from her.  

More people visit my farm to see the lamb, so I'm selling more produce.  

I've pre-sold all my lambs with a waitlist of more people who want lambs.

She needs exercise, so I'm spending more time outside with her and doing more gardening.

She needs to be socialized to sheep so I'm spending more time with my sheep.  Repairing fences before they become problems.  Working on preventative health care with my sheep.  

She needed the clothing to be warm the first few days, but now I've noticed just how clean a coat makes the wool so now I'm going to coat several of my sheep, hopefully increasing their wool value by about 4 times.  If it works.  But it's a good motivation for an experiment.

She wants a hug in the evenings while I'm watching a video.  Because she is so warm, I'm no longer needing to light a fire in the evening to get the edge off.  

I've decided to breed my goat so I'll be able to give goats milk to future bummers.  Because of this, and the cute lamb, I already have people signed up for weekly milk delivery (to places I already travel) next year.

She's very calm and quiet.  A good companion sheep which is worth more than their weight in gold if one ever needs to travel with a skittish animal.

She helps me round up ducks in the evening.  

I think the economical benefit of having this bummer is far more than the expense of the formula and the time spent nursing her back to health.  

Here's a question for you.  How can I test her vision?

She's doing well, growing like crazy, spending time with the other sheep... except, she has terrible depth perception and has to locate things more by sound and smell than by sight.  

Today I tried a few tests.  I wiggled my finger near one eye and got closer until she blinked.  The right eye she noticed at a couple of inches, but I ended up touching the left eye before she responded.  

So when feeding time came, I hid the bottle behind her head (normally my sheep have an eery ability to see behind them).  I brought it around slowly to the left of her head and she didn't see it until it was just about in front of her nose.  But from the right, she saw it when it was halfway to the front.  

edit to add: her eyes appear normal-ish.  The eyelids aren't turned in.  Nothing bright red or teary.  The eyes were cloudy for the first few days and are still lighter in colour than my other sheep.  

She is normal. They have rather poor eye sight when they are born and it gets better as they grow. My bottle lamb does the same thing. It has to do with how they are bonding...with you and the bottle instead of the ewe-mother.

Interestingly this happens with people too. My adopted sister was born to a crack-head mother who abandoned her for hours in her crib. She thus bonded to the lights of the room...yes the lights. Today, now 21 and suffering greatly from her experience of addiction at birth, (Fetal Alcohol synrome) will often "space out", looking at the lights wherever she is.

Luckily for lambs, as they are weaned and put on pasture with the other sheep, they will snap out of it. They will however, always be your friend, rushing over whenever they can. It has to do with the way a sheep is. They are called "dumb", but can actually remember faces up to 2 years. That is because a sheep has 1 defense...run. They have to quickly decide if a person is friend (their shepard or shepardess) or foe. That is why it is imperative that sheep farmers remain calm even when they get mad at their sheep and want to strangle them. Once aggression is displayed to an individual sheep, they remember it and are "flighty" for years later.

She's surviving but it's been a constant battle. She's two and a half weeks old now and still doesn't drink more than two-three ounces of lamb milk replacer [we transitioned away from raw goat milk, she seems to be doing better on the replacer] at a time.

I've discovered she has a significant underbite. If her teeth make contact with the dental pad at all [I'm not certain they do] it's just barely. Definitely not an animal to use for breeding [which is the real bummer here, because she's Icelandic and I had hoped to train her to be milked with the benefit of all this bonding.]

Extensive googling seems to suggest she might be able to graze, just not particularly short grass [which isn't grass I would want to graze anyway] but if anyone has any further knowledge on sheep underbite I would greatly appreciate anything you could tell me.

Kyrt Ryder wrote:She's surviving but it's been a constant battle.

Oh that's hard.  That's really hard.

I've heard of sheep dentures, but I don't know if they would work for this.  

Whish I could help.

My lamb is out with the flock during the day but her breathing is constantly laboured.  I'm not sure if it's pneumonia or something wrong with the way her lungs grew.  

Hello, my name is Michael.
I raise both sheep and goats. I've told my old farmer mentors about this experience, when the mother rejects one out of twins. "Mothers know." Was roundly the response I got. But I felt the same way you felt--damn the torpedos--and took one of these lambs into my house.

It was a complete pain, four feedings a day--I work full time elsewhere, an hour from home. She survived and added weight on the formula (nothing special, just feedstore formula, rubber nipple and plastic bottle), though slower than her twin.

She played, and cuddled. I read bedtime stories with my infant son in one armpit and the lamb in the other. When he was learning to walk, so was she. They played tag together, got their diapers changed together, had bottles in succession. My son would go to grandma's house, and Lamby would come with me to work, and wait in the basement while I cooked. She begged and cried to all the staff to hold her and play with the her, and they fawned over her constantly.

The time came to put her with the herd. She tore her diapers off and crapped from one end of the house to the other. Tag was no longer sufficient, and she would rear back on her hind legs and crash her head into my son, knocking him to the ground. Her instinct to climb increased and we would find her standing on the couch with her front legs on the top of the window. So the day came that she went outside to meet her family.

Medically, this worked out. She gained weight, I still went out and bottle fed her twice a day, she would come running and bellowing when she heard my footsteps, and crashed into my arms at full tilt. But psychologically, something wasn't right. The herd did not acknowledge her as a sheep. They would be grazing and when she approached they would wander off. The other lamb kids would not play with her. The ram took no interest in her. The mothers shunned her.

In a herd mentality, there is safety not only in numbers but interconnectedness--and this Lamby lacked.  One night the coyotes dug under the fence and launched a campaign. The usual defense is for the adult sheep to circle around the babies and make a hell of a lot of noise, to discourage predators smaller in number.  But this lamb was not protected by that social pact. All we ever found of her was the tuft of white fur in the fence getting dragged back through the hole.

It is one of my great sorrows in farming. It hurt so much.

I have come to feel as the old farmers do. What do I know--but that the genes, or condition, or chemistry of this baby are something any sheep can tell you (the sheep) we don't want in our midst? If I have this chance again to save a rejected lamb, I hope I have the courage to trust the mother and not relive this experience.

Michael, I'm truly sorry for the pain of that experience. But I would define courage as the willingness to sacrifice of your own resources and risk potential loss for the sake of another.

It may be true that the mother identified some irregularities in the lamb she rejected. Maybe not. One bottle lamb at our farm this year returned to his own mother four days later, and by some miracle she hadn't yet dried up, and she gladly accepted him as her own - he just had to be able to stand to nurse first.

Another mom was a yearling - the equivalwnt of a 13 year old mother. Not the best situation, and one I try to avoid, but I am not shocked that this mom needed a bit of coaching and a lot of grace to get the hang of her new roll.

There is a middle ground between letting it die and treating it like a house pet. We have successfully saved 3 last year, and 2 this year that were left for dead in the field. All but one of them were nursed by fosters, in the field, and all of them, even the bottle fed kid, are accepted by the flock. We have lost a handful in the field and 2 in our care in their first week of life. And this is hard - but they were seen, known, and valued, and that counts for something.

Should you try to save every rejected kid and lamb? It can be lot of work, and it doesn't always work out how you hoped - but such is life. You should never regret placing a higher value on the sanctity of life than the old-timers. That's a lesson worth passing on.

That's rough.  

Psychology of animals is really interesting to me.  Sheep (like most herd animals) identify in the first few days of living what is 'us' and what is 'other'.  I've been working really hard to make certain that my little lamb knows that sheep are part of the 'us' category.  The problem is she also includes chickens, ducks, and humans in this category, but at least 'us' includes sheep.  That's a big step in the right direction.  

Before she could walk, I would take her out to the flock several times a day to interact with the sheep.  When she could walk, I left her alone in the sheep yard.  At first, it was for two minutes here or there, but then it was 10, then half an hour, then ... well, you get the idea.  Now she spends daylight with the sheep and night time with us, and the twilight in a world between the two.  At first only the young lambs interacted with her.  All other sheep treated her like a non-person.  Now they include her in the flock dynamics.  Not exactly part of the hierarchy, but part of their flock.  

Another thing we had trouble with former bottle fed lambs is that they grow into big sheep.  Some behaviour is cute when they weigh 10 pounds, but not so cute when they weigh 200.  tough love for rams is a great document for helping to train sheep (not just the boys - although it works on boys as well ;)