My understanding is that over time, those liver parasites will seriously damage a normal sheep's liver. My vet also said it is worse on young lambs because they are born with the parasites. Before she went AWOL on me, my vet was planning to research what a good worming schedule would be for the blackbellies given that I wanted to minimize the amount of chemicals I put in my sheep. She had planned to study one of the livers out of a butchered lamb to determine what, if any, damage had occurred. Since she is no longer a resource for me, I'm still uncertain as to whether my sheep need any additional preventive worm measures or not. I'd love to hear others' experience with this.
Carol
At 09:46 PM 12/18/2002 -0800, you wrote:
I had two, ten and a half month old banded rams butchered today and want to share their weights because I had never believed the idea that banding didn't affect their ability to put on weight. They weighed about 35 pounds each. Last year a similar aged, non-banded ram weighed out at 37 pounds.
The butcher today did notice some parasites in one lamb's liver and asked me why I didn't worm my sheep. He said the liver parasite didn't affect or bother the lamb, though. Anybody else worry about liver parasites?
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