Udder Health

This is a photo of our ewe, Coconut, shortly after lambing. You can see that the teat in the picture is quite large and engorged with milk. This is the story of how Coconut went from having only one functioning udder half to both sides functioning normally.

When we got her in 2003, Coconut was one year old and had twin lambs two days old when we brought them home. We were new shepherds and weren't paying attention to the right things. When we finally noticed something was amiss, one of the lambs was declining. It turned out she wasn't getting enough to eat because Coconut only had milk on one side. We got a crash course in tube feeding a lamb.

The following year, after making sure both of Coconut's lambs had plenty of colostrum in the first few days, we took one of them as a bottle lamb. The non-functioning side of her udder got huge and we could tell it was painful for her but, try as we might, we couldn't get milk out of that half. Our vet tech suggested that the udder was blocked by scar tissue and there was nothing we could do about it. This year I decided to do some research and find out for myself.

Immediately after Coconut lambed, I inserted a sterile 18g needle through the sphincter into the teat. Voila - milk! For the next few days, Jennifer and I had to open the teat with a needle and either milk the ewe or let the lambs nurse. Unfortunately, the opening we made was closing up within hours afterward. The lambs weren't nursing enough on that side to keep it open. The teat remained much larger than the other side and the lambs had a tough time latching on without our help.

Finally, after about three days of this, I made the drive over to PBS Animal Health and bought a box of teat dilators. Teat dilators are small plastic devices that insert into the teat opening and hold it open inside while still allowing the sphincter to close. The idea is to leave the dilator in for 2-3 days, removing it every 12 hours to milk out the udder while preventing the lambs from nursing on that side.

When I got home with the dilators, we noticed that the teat on the closed side had finally shrunken down to the same size as the other side. We tried the teat and got milk. Apparently, the lambs had finally started nursing on that side and the teat was staying open. We ended up not needing to use the teat dilators.

Based on what I've read, I think we will probably have to go through this routine again next year. The cause is usually scar tissue in the teat but since this udder half had never functioned before I suspect that the ewe may simply have had a deformity.

tags: sheep, ewe, lamb, udder, teat, dilator, milk