Coping with Animal Deaths on the Farm

Reader Contribution by Maggie Bonham
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I’ve been intentionally staying away from writing because last year was horrific.  We lost animals right and left, and no matter what I did, it didn’t help. I’d like to say the veterinarians helped save them, but that would be a lie. I would like to say that the veterinarians knew what happened, but that’s also a lie.

Bad Things Happen

The bad news was I lost every single baby goat. Every. Single. One. That included the so-called healthy ones. And every single problem was different. When I paid for a necropsy on one kid, the veterinarian contacted me and told me I had a very healthy, dead baby kid. What the hell was I supposed to do with that?

I got three other llamas in late September. By the end of December, I had one llama left, because the so-called expert llama veterinarians couldn’t figure out what was killing them. One veterinarian even went so far as to claim I starved my llamas. When I pointed out that Sid and Llorelei had the run of the barn and could eat as much hay as they wanted, he started talking nonsense how my llamas couldn’t digest the very hay they had been raised on. I called BS.

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