Tinkerbell gets a new mommy

While we had hoped to try grafting our orphaned premie, Tinkerbell, onto the next experienced female that gave birth here anyway, sometimes a situation presents itself that is just too good to be true. Not that there wasn’t a dark side to this latest occurrence: Fawn Angel, who has been a part of our herd for over 10 years now, delivered a white female breech yesterday and unfortunately for us by the time we realized what was happening, it was too late and we lost the cria. Breech births have perhaps a 50% success ratio (as in resulting in a live baby) and yesterday was our turn to be on the short end of that statistical stick.

Of course out of the tragedy of that loss came some very real good. Fawn Angel, who is well into her teens, is one of our most experienced breeding females and there would be few veteran females in our herd that would have been better prepared to adopt Tinkerbell even if her own cria had made it.

As it was, Jen swept the still born cria away from Fawn Angel in a towel and returned a few minutes later with Tink, who was somewhat flummoxed initially, wrapped in that same towel. For added authenticity some of the fluid from Fawn Angel’s afterbirth was poured over Tink as well as using some of the fetal membranes from the still born cria. We had to give Tinkerbell that “new cria smell” after all! I have to say that in the many years that we have pulled such stunts, yesterday was probably the easiest sell ever in terms of getting the adoptive female to buy into the program. If there was any hesitation at all in fact it was on Tink’s part, who after spending the past few days trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to snitch milk off of the other dams in her feed group, all of a sudden found herself for the first time in her short life with a mother who wanted nothing but to let her nurse! No getting kicked, no getting spat at. Though we will leave the two of them in the neonatal bonding pen for a day or two just to be sure, by all appearances we can put the hanging bottle away for now: Tinkerbell has herself a new mom!  Photos of the new pairing to follow…

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