White grubs, 3/8 inch long, wriggle as I pick them out from the rotten flesh between the two halves of a deep brown ewe´s back right hoof. The first time, Tomas pulled out around a hundred and twenty. By the third day of treatment, there are only two. Neither of us bothered to count the little, 1/16th inch worms or the eggs, both are far too many. The hoof is still swollen to two and a half times the size of the healthy one on the left side, and the sheep won´t even touch it to the ground. My hand gets so stinky just from holding the hoof still while I work with forceps that even after two washings with strong bar soap, the smell disgusts me when I try to eat afterward. Only the special, fruit essence smelling soap covers it sufficiently.
The treatment regimen; wash with soap and water, soak the hoof in gasoline, pick out any eggs or grubs that wriggle to the surface, coat with old motor oil to prevent new eggs being laid. Perhaps I got ahead of myself - actually, the routine starts with 15 minutes of chasing sheep, then continues where I began. The sheep are not docile, easy to pick up fluffies like in the Jesus pictures. They have short wiry hair, like a Doberman Pinsher´s, and look like goats. They love to hide under the old mission house, built threee-and-a-half feet high on stilts. No problem for two foot sheep. Lots of problems for 5´7¨ me. And they´re fast. Even if they can be persuaded to go into their pen (a doubtful and tiring task, involving a lot of running through high grass and a little animal psychology), they dash from one corner to another unless very carefully cornered. You have to approach from almost exactly the middle of the angle between the two fence lines coming together to a corner. As the sheep considers one way of escape, then the other, you have to make just enough motion in that direction to make it reconsider, not enough though to make it sure it should run the other way. Sadly, having only three weight-bearing legs makes little difference in sheep velocity.
Several days of this, and an eventual switch to using Gensiana de Violeta, a deep purple antimicrobial ointment and a antiparisite spray eventually calm the infection down. The foot is still swollen, but starting to take some weight, barely stinks, and hasn´t had worms or eggs for over a week. If we had a raised stable, with wooden slat floors to keep the sheep hooves out of the dirt at night, and a tray of copper sulfate, we probably wouldn´t have to deal with this. But the thought of building one is far in the future, when God provides funding (first we have to get some more urgent needs out of the way - electricity and a tractor, etc).
3 comments:
Hehe. Yay for chasing sheep... especially when its dark out and you can only see their eyes glowing. :P What happened to the injection, or was that for something else? Oh yeah, and I still think making friends might work... weeks of feeding them granola bars could make a difference, you know... or maybe peanut butter would do the trick. ;)
It has been a few years since I last worked with sheep but I can still remember catching them to shear, worm, tag, etc. them - it was even more fun as a kid - to dive towards a ram that weighed five times as much as you, and have him drag you through the muck in the barn untill you finally got one hand away from the task of "hanging around his neck for dear life" and to a foot which you could pick up.
Sheep really are stupid, aren't they? But I have to sympathize with them--I'd run, too, if a big, bad human was chasing me down to try to get his hands on my sore hoof. Kind of like the way I run from God sometimes. Glad He's good at the chasing.
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