On the bright side , matings have gone well , all the girls have been mated now except Brizo , she is a maiden who showed a lot of interest a week ago , but seems to have got cold feet now that her turn has come , we'll wait and try again in a couple of days. Hermione has spat , and none of the other girls ( who were so keen a week ago ) could be persuaded to even come and look at Magic , I take that as a good sign.
On the other hand Diablo is causing me a lot of concern . I just don't have a good feeling about this . I weighed him tonight and he has lost a couple of 100g's , his feeding is erratic , and I rarely catch him feeding from mum . She has plenty of milk , and lets him feed but far too often I find him tucked up under a hedge or sunbathing and she is not paying him any attention. As soon as I appear with a bottle then she is right by his side . We have bottle fed a couple of cria over the last 5 years and I have never had one who is not interested in the same way Diablo isn't. He started so well , coming eagerly to the bottle , but now I have to catch him , and tonight I had to practically force feed him . Undoubtedly I am going to have to take a more proactive stance on this one , we go on holiday in 3 wekks time , so I need to be sure he is doing better by then or the house sitters will have a nightmare! Does anybody have any ideas or tips , I could really do with some !
And foxes , don't mention foxes !!! I have barely had a good nights sleep for weeks due to the constant attentions of a fox. Last night it chewed the corner of the nesting box , I kid you not , sometimes a gun looks most appealing .
2 comments:
I also went through nightmares with my Greeves - and spent many frustrating hours in the field trying to force a bottle on him. We had a feacal sample done at one point as he just was not putting on any weight and was very listless and found coccidia - which we treated with Baycox - but other than that it was just keep trying. We started with goats milk as that was recommended but then I went for sheep milk replacer - Lamblac. Sorry, I know all that is no help - good luck!
I had a male cria born in 2008 who needed top up bottle feeding who was a complete nightmare to feed. He was almost force fed most days.
Do you feed goats milk? Eventually Gaussian decided he liked hot goats milk (much hotter than I would normally feed) with half a teaspoon of glucose to 300ml of milk.
He was the boy that BBC Countryfield filmed me feeding, thankfully when he liked bottles!!
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