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Taking care of your livestock when TSHTF - cephalopod - 1 July 2016
If you are lucky enough to have livestock when prepping for your self we must also be thinking about them.
There are myriad of problems that can be found with your livestock from illness to injury, with both they are often impossible to foresee and prevent.
A lot of the medications that humans use can also be used for your animals, pain relief, antibiotics even anti-inflamatories.
If you are lucky enough to have found a good vet, they will let you have a supply on hand, a selection of bottled anitibiotics, intramamarys, foot sprays, the problem with vaccines these days for livestock is that they have a very limited shelf life, once you have extracted the first dose they usually die within eight hours so are worthless, (you can thank the EU for this one "regulations"). When I first started keeping goats nearly forty years ago you used to be able to get a wonderful vaccine called tasvax 8, this covered eight of the chloristriduim varieties that are most prevelant in this country, and while I used it I never lost an animal, once they changed the mix it became not unusual to loose an animal as not only was it not so effective, it also did not cover all of the species, now you can only use something called lambivac and for goats its really not worth bothering with. The other down side to todays vaccines is that if unopened they will last a considerable time, but they have to be kept in a fridge.
Broken limbs on livestock can be treated the same as us, just remember they have enourmous pain tolerance and while they may not show it but will be hurting. Large livestock like cows broken front and lower back legs can be treated easily, provided you can hold them still and calm, while femurs on cattle can be mended this will depend on where the break is and how old the cow is. In my medical kit I have a huge amount of ready to make plaster, this comes in the form of rolls coated with plaster of paris you soak them in water and hey presto its real easy to put on once you have your cotton wool base, this is a two man job though.
Mastitis for milking animals is another problem that often crops up it does not matter how good your hygene is it happens, a basic disinfectant udder wash should keep most nasties at bay, but one particular strain is really quick and really persistant, we used to call it black garget I have no idea what you call it in reality, it was named because if the cow or goat was lucky the infection would stay in the udder which affected quarter would then turn black and slough off, this believe it or not was a life saver and considered lucky. Todays intramamarys are very good and highly effective and have a reasonably long shelf life, but I expect as long as they are not opened will retain effectiveness for considerably longer. But cows still die from this and still loose quarters.
Any good cream will do to keep teats soft and crack free even l'oreal I use vaseline, sudocream or zinc and castor what ever you can find, of course if you have milking animals and caustic soda you can make your own.
Sheep and goats have feet there is always one limping, a dry area is key to feet, run them though the foot bath, copper sulphate can be bought on ebay and keeps forever, once the antibiotic foot sprays have run out, if you only have a few put the solution in a large can and just dip individual feet in.
Cuts and tears again any form of sutering fit for us is good for them, milking animals often can tread on each others teats this can be nasty provided they have not hit the milk channel you can freeze the area enough with ice cubes in order to suture or tape with very strong tape, remember when milking it will all come off, hand milking is best if they do this as machines while quick are quite harsh. If the channel has been hit you need a canular, you can get really good reuseable stainless ones from a good veterinary supplier this should be something in your first aid box without it you will be looking at a constantly leaking cow.
Goats use a huge amount of salt but just your everyday variety will do, you can add cobalt to it for extra b vitamins something a milking animal uses a lot of, again powdered cobalt will last forever and help prevent aneamia.
REMEMBER never ever give a ruminating animal cod liver oil their bodies cannot synthesis it and it will kill them it causes a condition called pine fading.
Hope this is of interest to someone and helps.
Three essentials when TSHTS, a good larder, a good library, and a good loo.
You cannot prepare for every eventuality but keep them in mind as you prepare for your self.
RE: Taking care of your livestock when TSHTF - Skean Dhude - 1 July 2016
I've thought about this long and hard. Any of my livestock that gets ill enough to die is going to die. I'm going to spread around and make sure not everything is in one spot. Multiple sites as much as possible.
Just make sure they are fed as well as I can and anything, like koalas or pandas, that have a single specialised diet that I have difficulty with will be first on my menu.