You should routinely check your sheep daily – twice a day during lambing. Any disease or injury problems must be treated promptly. Unless they are one of the self-shedding breeds, sheep need to be shorn at least once a year.
You should inspect livestock frequently enough to avoid unnecessary suffering - usually this is at least once a day. You should check more often during: extreme weather. lambing and kidding.
Lambing Kit
Most ewes will lamb within an hour of their water breaking, therefore ewes must be checked at least once per hour. Any ewe that has not made progress within 30 minutes after her water has broken should be laid down and checked.
Provide fresh water, free choice, 24/7. Provide adequate roughage (hay, silage or pasture). Provide adequate nutrition (pasture, high quality forage or grains) to brood ewes during the last third of gestation and until their lambs are weaned.
Monitoring sheep
Signs of good health in sheep include: alertness. free movement. active feeding and ruminations.
Sheep are grazing animals. They eat grasses and other low-growing vegetation and ruminate (chew the cud). They spend most of the day alternating between periods of grazing and resting/ruminating. Sheep only sleep for around 4 hours per day.
Generally speaking, adult ewes should not need to be wormed unless there is a particular problem on the farm, but it can be advisable to treat ewes carrying triplets (or even twins) before lambing. Otherwise, worming is usually unnecessary in adult sheep.
As sheep are somewhat crepuscular, in my observation, they tend to eat in the morning, chew cud in the afternoon, and then eat again as evening falls. Unlike humans, sheep doze in small amounts throughout the day and night but don't engage in a lot of deep, long sleep.
A sheep will usually tell you if it is hungry!
Tame sheep who associate you with food will make a lot of noise whenever they see you, if you don't have enough grass on the field and they are standing around bleating and waiting for you you and not trying to graze, then they are hungry.
However, evidence with sheep is less clear; one study demonstrated feeding did have an effect (1): 65% of lambings occurring within 4 h before, and 8 h after feeding – therefore feeding in the morning was recommended.
Sheep are typically shorn at least once a year, usually in spring. Most sheep are shorn by professional shearers who are paid by the number of sheep they shear – this can be up to 200 sheep a day (2-3 minutes per sheep).
Mucking out the lambing sheds or pens, topping up hay racks and providing fresh drinking water are all part of the daily routine. The majority of lambs are castrated, ear-tagged and tail-docked before they are one week old.
If shearing in autumn then all sheep should be crutched in late winter, a couple of weeks before lambing is due. A pre-lambing crutching coincides with removing wool from around the udder to reduce the risk of udder strike and makes suckling easier.
Mature sheep will consume ~0.02 lb (9 g) of salt daily, and lambs half this amount. Range operators commonly provide 0.5–0.75 lb (225–350 g) of salt/ewe/mo. Salt as 0.2%–0.5% of the dietary dry matter is usually adequate.
Drenching too often or not following a set program, is also a problem. As a general guideline, non-breeding sheep should need a single drench a year, and lambing ewes and weaners two drenches. Please keep in mind that conditions on your property and in your region will ultimately affect how many drenches you need.
Most adult sheep have low worm egg counts in early summer and a drench at that time is not warranted; delaying a drench until late March or April allows some less-resistant worms to survive.
Normally sheep should be treated every three to four weeks. Keep in mind that worms may develop resistance to a drug if exposed frequently. Lower stocking rates will reduce the intensity of the deworming program. Fewer sheep result in fewer shed worm eggs within a given area, and thereby reducing parasite loads.
Grain overload is also known as acidosis or grain poisoning. It occurs when cattle, sheep or goats eat large amounts of grain, and can result in acidosis, slowing of the gut, dehydration and often death. Veterinary treatment is required for severe cases.
The dangers are manifold. Here are some things caused by overfeeding. It makes laboring and lambing difficult for ewes. If you find yourself having to pull more lambs than usual, and those lambs are large, it's a sign that your ewes may be overfed (or were, especially during the final four to six weeks of gestation).
The data demonstrated that sheep gain on both fresh and dry grass clippings with carcasses having acceptable quality. In addition, the bluegrass produced high value silage when mixed with other carbohydrates.
The most common clostridial diseases that affect sheep are tetanus, blackleg, malignant oedema (blood poisoning), and pulpy kidney (which affects lambs).