alpacas: Re: [AlpacaTalk] wall baby

I'd be cautious with the calcium paste. A couple of years ago I gave a dam a bit of Cal Mag Phos paste, or maybe Cal Mag Se, prior to delivery, only a small amount and only a couple of times before the delivery. Cria had to spend a week at OSU with tube feeding, 2 plasma transfers, 3 weeks of Naxcel...

Dam and cria had highly elevated blood calcium levels like they'd never heard of before... lots of other problems.

My wall baby, however, has taken 20 ounces of milk/yogurt so far. Also, I milked about 2 ounces of colostrum from mama and fed that by bottle. She also nursed a bit from dam by force, as in I forced her to nurse from mama. Mama was very good and stood well.

Later on, I also forced baby to keep head still while mama kissed her as they do. Well, I held her head still. :) I have read that the saliva transfer from kissing is an important bonding factor in mammals. Makes sense, as all mammal mamas kiss their babies and of course it is an important bonding factor in human adult relationships.

So anyway. They are confined to a stall together tonight. I'll go check on them in an hour or so with another bottle just in case. I'd much rather have a bottle baby than a dead baby. Also, female. :) And so far looks really nice.

Heather

On Jun 19, 2009, at 8:21 PM, Susan Forman wrote:

Hmmm, now there's a thought.......I guess I'd be afraid of overdosing her? Don't want to get her chemistry all out of whack, but then again, if she needs it...it could be a real boon for all of us! I'll look some stuff up first, but thanks for the info. I thought about it a couple of weeks ago when she was shivering one morning, but then she stopped and it turned out that I think she just got a chill that cold morning........OSU said the shivering wasn't from cold, nothing to fix it, and told me she probably had a torsion..........which I didn't buy and she didn't have.....Anyway, I'll look it up since I'm funny about adding things to their internal chemistry if it isn't needed.

Thanks,
Susan

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