Tackling summer's more common animal ailments - Old Hutton vet

SUMMER in Cumbria is always a challenging one to predict, but it’s safe to say we’ve had a fair mix of hot, cold, wet and dry this year so far!

Despite this, I feel like we’ve faired a lot better than other parts of the country and have largely avoided some of the more dramatic weather seen elsewhere. Although it was a late spring, grass growth has been pretty good this year and we’ve got plenty of healthy and happy livestock thriving outside. Summer as a farm animal vet can be a little bit quieter, as the hectic spring calving and lambing seasons are over and autumn calving hasn’t quite started yet. Farmers are busy silaging, haymaking and harvesting crops such as barley to feed their livestock over the winter. However, this gives us a little bit more time to catch up on important things such as flock and herd health planning and helping farmers get ready for their farm assurance inspections.

But, as always, we do see certain conditions that are more common in summer months. The hot, muggy weather means that sheep are at risk of flystrike, which can be made a lot worse if animals have a high burden of gastrointestinal worms, as they can cause dirty bottoms. Because of this (and the impact on animal performance), we are carrying out a lot of faecal samples to identify if any worms are present. As vets, we work hard to try and reduce the routine administration of wormers, so examining these poo samples under the microscope is important for getting a diagnosis and allowing us to formulate a treatment or control plan based on the results. Cattle are also at risk of lungworm at this time of year, which can cause severe pneumonia-like signs. Even though these worms affect the lungs, we can diagnose it on faecal samples, so we are doing lots of these too!

As we head into the autumn months, dairy and beef farmers will be thinking about prepping their cattle for housing, including making sure sheds are clean and tidy and that they have plenty of feed available. There are lots of gimmer lamb sales this time of year, so we are advising farmers to give quarantine anti-parasite treatments when newly purchased stock arrives, to reduce the risk of bringing resistant worms onto the farm. Sheep farmers are also starting to think about getting ready for tupping season, which starts around the end of September through to the end of November. Even though tups are only in action for a couple of months of the year, they need to be in tip-top shape, so we are busy carrying out their annual MOTs, which include evaluating semen samples under the microscope. We are also taking lots of blood samples to check that ewes are not short of minerals that may affect their fertility, while farmers are vaccinating their ewes against the two most common causes of abortion in sheep – toxoplasmosis and enzootic abortion. We focus a lot on preventative healthcare. To find out more about the services Yan Farm Health has to offer, please visit www.yanfarmhealth.co.uk