Farm life is sometimes quite disgusting!
07.04.05 (8:40 am) [edit]
This $th of July didn't turn out the way I had planned it!
Saturday night I worked until 8pm and I was planning on meeting a friend and her daughter here in town to watch the fireworks, but just before I left work I got a massive headache so I just came home instead of going to watch the fire works. About ten minutes after I got home my mother came in the door and asked me if I could help her... one of the lambs had fly eggs in its wool. I really didn't feel like I was going to be much help because by this time my head hurt so bad. I rarely get headaches but when I do .. look out!
Mom and I were trying to clip the fly eggs out of the wool with scissors, then we discovered that there were some that had already hatched... (this is so disgusting!)... and there was an area on the lamb's back about 5 inches in diameter that was just packed with maggots. They were down under her wool so just looking at the top of her back you couldn't even seen them until we pulled the wool apart. There were hundreds of them. I was thinking that I'd just shear her down to the skin and wash her off ... well... the electric shears would not work so I started clipping her by hand with scissors. That wasn't working because they were spreading into the rest of her wool faster then I could clip them out. Mom was trying to hold the lamb still, while I clipped. The whole Time I was thinking about what was going to happen to this little lamb if we didn't get all the maggots out of her wool. I knew if we kept at it we could get them because they hadn't broken her skin yet, they were just in the wool If they had created a hole in the skin then it would have been harder to get all of them, they would have gotten under the skin too. Eventually we did get them all but it took us about two hours. When we were done we washed and dried her but the poor baby was so traumatized that she was shaking all over, because she isn't used to being handled.
Last night *KM* asked me to go shopping with her... (I hate shopping..LOL) but I went with her because I haven't seen her in a while and it gave us a chance to talk again. After we got back to my house we watched a Extreme Makeovers [yeah I know we live such an exciting life :-) ], and it was after 11pm when she left my house, so I didn't get a chance to post here.
