Several years ago my friend and blackbelly sheep breeder Barb Lee
posted quite a bit of correspondence to this e-mail list regarding
some nutritional problems she was seeing in her sheep. She concluded
that her sheep were actually suffering from a copper deficiency, and
she had quite a bit of data to back up that conclusion. Her sheep
began to improve once she added an appropriate level of copper as a
supplement to their diet. It was very interesting because like
Carla's note below, Barb said essentially that because copper-free
sheep diets have been promoted so heavily, many sheep breeders
overlook the fact that their flocks can sometimes actually be
suffering from too LITTLE copper. I do not know if Barb is still
subscribed to this e-mail list, but if you are Barb, it would be very
helpful if you could give us the basics of this information again!
Thanks in advance,
Mary Swindell
At 05:00 PM 6/13/2010, you wrote:
Message: 3
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2010 06:41:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: Carla Amonson <chicki...@yahoo.com>
To: "blackbelly@lists.blackbellysheep.info"
<blackbelly@lists.blackbellysheep.info>
Subject: [Blackbelly] Copper
Message-ID: <711538.58666...@web32504.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Intetesting that copper came up yesterday as I was talking to a
livestock nutritioust on Friday about copper. Did you know that
sheep can very safely conusume up to 7ppm of Cooper daily? Our
industry has chosen to promote copper free when in reality our sheep
do need some copper and there are startig to be some issues our
there with copper deficiencies. We cam get custom mineral mixes here
according to feed and soil samples, but a minimum of 400 lbs. That
is a lot of mineral, even with 210 head! I generally mix in some
cattle mineral with my sheep mineral.
There are many vegetarian dog treats out there-even a tiny bit if
meat is a concern. That is supposedly what caused BSE if you recall
and has made a 8 year nightmare of the cattle industry in Canada. I
am a little more inclinded to believe the story about pour on
wieners causing BSE myself, but still herbavors should not eat
animal products of any sort.
Carla Amonson
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