Blade

In a nod to the vampire trilogy featuring the now incarcerated Wesley Snipes, I named my solid black bottle lamb "Blade". He is currently asleep on my feet under my desk. His mother didn't have any milk, and by the time I found him he was more than 24 hours old and hadn't had any colostrum. I mixed up powdered colostrum in his bottle for a week, can't hurt right? Been keeping him indoors most of the time to avoid him picking up any nasties from the other sheep, but I had to leave him at the clinic over the weekend and he came home with a head cold. Adding B12 and antibiotics to his bottle now, so far he doesn't seem to notice the taste.

Speaking of taste, I tried lamb milk replacer once and it tastes like ass. No wonder it's so hard to get them to take a bottle at first. I would have to be starving to drink that swill too. And so I bring you my own lamb milk replacer mix that no lamb of mine has ever refused.

Take a gallon milk jug, pour in 1 cup of buttermilk, 1 cup of heavy cream, and 1 can of evaporated milk (not the low fat crap either), then fill jug up with whole milk.

Basically the same thing that a lot of goat people use, but I upped the milk fat by adding the heavy cream. It smells sweet and it must taste good because I've had lambs who had been nursing on their dams come over to try to steal his bottle. So far he's growing fast and is fat as a tick. It's not cheap... not with milk running $4-5 a freakin gallon now days... but for the occasional bottle lamb I can handle it.