She lambed to what appeared to be 2 healthy ramlings one night. She had them all on her own without our intervention. We decided to leave the lambs on her for about 24 hours, then pull them and make them bottle babies, and use her milk to make yummy cheeses with. Well, that all changed about 5 hours after she had the lambs . . .
We noticed that one of the little ramlings was crying every now and then. Around here (since we have dealt with sick goats every now and then over the years) we call it the "death cry". He would moan and yell a little and then get quiet. He would stand up and was nursing on his mother. We checked her teats and she was full of colostrum. So, we waited and watched for a little while. About every 10 or 15 minutes, he would cry. I said to pull the lambs off and make them bottle babies sooner than our original plan. We got both of them hooked on the bottle pretty easily. I was hoping that this would quiet his death cries. I was thinking that maybe he just wasn't getting enough out of his mother as he should be (although, I found that hard to believe as she was full and she was being a good mother).
Well, my "sheep-raising-daughter" went in look at him and see if maybe he was constipated. We thought a little mineral oil wouldn't hurt him and that it might actually help him. She came out of the bathroom and told me something I was not expecting to hear - the crying ramling had no anal opening! I said, "No way! Let me see". Sure enough, he was missing the hole. There was not even a spot for it. Soooo, he was suffering from a "constipation" of sorts. There was no way anything was ever going to pass out of him. We made the decision to put him out of his misery.
The following are 2 pics. The first is of his healthy brother's anal opening and the 2nd of his lack of an anal opening:
I did do a little bit of online research about this condition. Most of the time it is just a fluke event that happens. If it happens to a female animal, sometimes they are able to live because there is a second opening there already. With a male it is a different story . . . surgery sometimes helps but, it is expensive and not always successful.
