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I want to introduce you to the latest member of the family here at the farm. Oh, I know.
I hear your mommy, I hear your mommy. This is a White Dorper lamb. It's about 3 days
old. It's a little female. And you can see her mother in the background. She is not happy.
This is the offspring of Zeus. You go, Zeus. Zeus is your daddy, right? Right? So, anyway,
these little guys are so cute. What we do is when they're born, if it looks like the
ewe is going into contractions or about to give birth, we like to bring them into this
corral, so it's a little quieter and they're away from any source of predators. And this
little guy, I mean, when they're first born they're a little wobbly. They soon get up
and start moving around. And after 3 days, you can hardly catch the things. You're so
fast, you really are. It's very important that they start nursing quickly. They need
to get that colostrum in their body, which is that first bit of milk that the mother
produces that the baby needs. So we were excited that the mother was producing plenty of milk
and this baby's getting plenty of milk. You can see its little umbilical chord is still
there. And what we'll do is we'll dock its tail. So the lamb tail is typically long,
but as you can see, it can get kinda messy back here. So what we'll do is dock it's tail
back here. There's not much feeling back here in the tail, so we'll bob it. So it'll have
a clean ***. But anyway, she's a cute little thing. Okay, okay, here we go, there we go.
Go with you're mommy. There you go, okay, sorry. Sorry. Sorry to disturb you. You know,
this time of year it can still really get kind of cold at night. In fact, it dropped
down into the 40s. And it's important that the lambs have shelter. So beyond just having
this corral, where they can feel protected, we need a place for the mother and the lamb
to go in, where she can be near the mother and she can actually stay warm. A baby lamb
should have a temperature of about 102 to 103. If they drop below that, around 100 or
99, they're considered hypothermic. And actually 20 percent of young lambs die, and it's usually
because the conditions aren't right within just a few days of birth. So, it's important
that we have this facility and we really watch them this time of year because it's kind of
lambing season. And we'll start seeing more and more of these little guys, which is really
exciting. So this is kind of the first lamb of the season. We need to give her a Z name,
some I'm gonna call her Baby Zoe. Baby Zoe would just be perfect for that little lamb.
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