Hello everyone, we hope everything is going well with your various herds/flocks. We thought it was
time to touch base with you all.
Worms!!!
APHA are reporting massive levels of faecal egg counts being found in cases of illthrift all of ruminants. This is due to the wet weather throughout the summer. If you haven’t done any WEC yet please consider sending in a sample to check the status of your animals. We are potentially getting close to the first frost when worms will start to encyst so it is worth considering using either a group 3, 4 or 5 wormer to ensure low worm burdens going into the winter. Please call us to discuss which is the best option for you.
Ram fertility tests
Tupping time is coming up fast, is your ram ready to go? Up to 30% of breeding rams are subfertile, this will result in lower lambing percentages and a more spread-out lambing period. This can cause and increase in diseases especially in the younger, later born lambs. North Park have the capabilities to do a full ram fertility investigation, either on farm or in the practice. Please ring us to discuss prices and book an appointment.
Fluke treatment
It’s time to start thinking about fluke treatment. It is likely the water snails required for the fluke lifecycle took a knock in early summer due to the very dry May and June. But they will have recovered with the wet July/August, so levels are likely to increase as we go further into winter. We would recommend that you do not treat your sheep/goats with a combination wormer/fluke, and hold off with fluke treatment until later in the autumn when you can use a drug other than triclabendazole (fasinex), which we are trying to restrict use of to cases where animals are dying from acute fluke.
We are still hoping to fix a date for a lameness meeting soon, please look at for an email to confirm
date and arrangements once we have confirmed the details.
