- Location
- West Wales
I don't think they have to know, just something wrong in the behaviour pattern. Same way a computer program won't work if something as simple as a comma is in the wrong place. Can't go against Nature.
It is interesting how some clever person worked out that tubing lambs doesn't usually seem to interfere with their instinct to suck. That used to be a real problem with cold lambs brought inside to warm up and then returned to their mothers. Or how a ewe will adopt an orphan that is wearing a jacket made out of the skin of their own dead lamb. That is a very old trick.
A lecturer in sheep management told me that putting a ewe that's rejecting a lamb into stocks (so she's forced to take it) will generally accept it when the lamb has digested and passed the milk from that ewe. Don't know if it's true, but it does make sense.
We skin if a ewe loses a lamb in the first few days or at birth. If it's the first lamb from twins dead then we will wet adopt while the second lamb is being born - works every time.
The milk from a ewe passing through trick works most of the time as the poo smells of her own milk, so her smell. Rubbing that poo all over the lamb's head and tail works but wouldn't recommend it as they stink from it so it's not nice but I've seen a student do it and it did work.. the stocks also wears down the ewe's mental health so she has no choice but to take the lamb sometimes works.
I've got a char x Suffolk yearling that hated both of her lambs from birth, head butted one breaking its leg so we adopted elsewhere once mended and the other she wasn't keen on but lay on in him in a 6 acre field one night when he was 8 days old :/