Keeping Animals Healthy after SHTF?

[TOF]

Many of us have animals, either pets, poultry or large livestock. It occurred to me how would you keep your animals healthy after a catastrophic SHTF event.
This would probably mean no Vets, no Shearers, no Blacksmiths, little to no hard feed(grains etc), no supplements or specialised feed. How would you support your animals and keep them healthy.
If the worst happened, could you humanely destroy it?

[Sunna]

i would open as many farm gates as possable letting cows and sheep to roam from field to field as they would eat all the grass in their own [thats if they have not all been eaten] same with chickens keeping some for myself id free range the rest hopefully leading to a new wild food sorce.

[Skean Dhude]

I've thought about this and besides the basics I don't think many of us could do any real vet type work any more that what medical work we could do. Doctors and Vets would be interchangeable

All we could do is keep them as healthy as we can by keeping them clean and away from harm.

If it came down to it destroying it would be necessary to protect the rest then I think anyone growing them for food is already beyond that point. Most animals are raised solely for food at some point. Egg laying chickens and horses are a couple of the few animals that you might not expect to kill as a matter of course. If you intend keeping any animal then you need to consider that you may be forced to destroy it at some stage. It makes sense to do so.

[SecretPrepper]

Egg laying chicken can become a stew chicken after they have stopped laying. But other pets/Animals I wouldn't no what to do with. Might be worth learning some basic animal health care basics

[bigpaul]

have a look online for your county small holding group, they usually do courses on animal husbandry.

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for example: http://www.devonsmallholders.co.uk/training.html

[Mortblanc]

One reason some of the animals we use on the average farm are there is because they require very little direct care. Many parts of the US are now overrun with wild hogs and the American South west was once the home of millions of wild cattle. Most raised there are still nearly wild. Some are turned out in the spring and not seen again until fall gathering and sale time.

Hogs are an excellent example and will do as well in the feral state as when penned and fed prime expensive feed.

I raised cattle for many years and lost only a minimal number of adult animals. Most of my losses were still born calves and cows that died in birthing. I could count on losing one cow a year and there was little that could be done about it. I had 100 head +-, and the increase covered my losses and more. Nothing like walking out the door on a spring morning to find 50-75 new baby calves prancing and leaping about. Money in the bank!

My cattle were in open fields, partly wooded, and they reverted to almost feral, but would come up to the feed trailer when I was hauling hay during bad weather. They were never milked and were not used to constant care and attention. Many times the heard would not let you get near an injured member or a new calf.

You will also find that there are many people that are not vets that have excellent husbandry skills and almost every large farm or community has an individual that does the castrating, dehorning and most vet work right up to the major surgery stage. I am sure the same goes for sheep and I know that the local farrier is as good as most vets with horses.

"Back in the day", when my father was growing up on a dairy farm, he jokes that any animal that was past saving got eaten! If a cow had gone crippled or was severely injured you put it down and butchered it out ASAP to save as much meat as possible.

You did not spend $1000 on a vet to save a $300 cow. Nor did you spend more to save a milker than she was going to produce in the next year, especially if she might die anyway. That is modern "lap dog" thinking. You always had stock "coming up" to take the place of any losses you might suffer.

As for "putting them down humanely"????

SHTF you are going to find that the humane society disappears and that you kill what you have too any way you can. It might be simply an knife across the throat, a bullet in the brain, a sledge hammer to the head or a pithing spike at the base of the skull. Chickens will get their necks wrung and rabbits will still get the traditional whack to the back of the head with a stout stick.

The wild cattle might not decide to cooperate and you might wind up shooting them in the field and butchering them in place, or dragging them home behind a pony. Lord help you if all you have is a 30# bow and a few discount store arrows!

[Jace]

I imagine post-event that vets will be in higher demand as human rather than animal doctors.

I was in a car accident a few years back and ended up having my wound sewn up by a dentist, as all the doctors were working on the poor unfortunate who was run over. I guess a vet could do surgeries etc as well as any doc, although not too sure how accurate diagnosis would always be.

[bigpaul]

most animals will escape from their fields post SHTF once they have eaten all the grass in their field. cows will push through any gap in a hedge but your real escape artists are sheep, many is the time we have had to stop the car and round up sheep on the road and herd them into a nearby field.we already have many "Wild" boar in North Devon having been let loose from farms by the Animal Liberation lot. Deer are overstocked all over the UK, they also have bovine TB but TPTB don't advertise that fact.

[Skean Dhude]

Mortblanc,

You make a good point there about food animals.

Of course you don't invest more than you have to. If you have ten roosters and one has the lurgy then you cull it and humanely, imo, means with minimal pain not it gets two weeks rest and you use valuable resources that puts it to sleep. However you have one rooster and it gets the lurgy you may need to invest significant resources if it can't be replaced easily. A £2 rooster will be worth a lot more after an event as most people with chickens don't have roosters and rely on there being replacements when theirs are gone.

Each situation needs to be considered on its merits and I can foresee a situation, especially with larger animals, where we have a single point of failure. A bull and a ram. Where we may only have a small amount.

Of course longer term we need to fix that but there will be a time where a single animals life will be worth investing significantly more resources than we would now.

[Scythe13]

I'm glad the wife's best friend (my best mate's wife to be) is a vet. However, I have often wondered about what we would do if all the gear she needed ran out. Things like Metacam for the smaller animals, Mixi-immunisation gear, and the various kinds of antibiotics too.

One thing to be weary of, animal medican is frequently the same as human medication, but not always the other way round! As an example, if you had infected fish, you could use amoxycillin. However, if you used amoxycillin for a horse, it'll drop dead.

Knowing what to use on which animals is as critical as having the right medication itself.