The flies strike Dolly

On Monday night I got a call from my friend at the farm to say that there was something wrong with one of my girls. She was isolating herself from the flock and was constantly scratching with her back-left leg. This is almost always a tell-tale sign of them being flyblown, so I went up straight away to help catch her in order to bring her in and treat her.

To treat this, you shave off the fleece where she is suspected to be infected which is normally around the back end and abdomen as they tend to be the dirtier spots (the flies like to lay the eggs where the wool is a bit wet and soiled). To spot where they have been infected there will often be dark/green streaks in the fleece produced from the maggots' waste and you will easily see maggots crawling through the fleeced. Once you've shaved off the coat where they are infected, you need to spray all the areas with a fly and maggot spray that will kill off any maggots left on the sheep.

Once we'd treated Dolly, we kept her in over night with a bit of hay and then checked her the morning after to see how she was recovering. On the Tuesday morning there were no more signs of maggots etc. and she wasn't scratching so we let her out to the others.

I was up yesterday to make sure everything was ok and it was. Dolly was showing absolutely no signs of infection and the rest of the flock were still perfectly happy and healthy!