I’ve had several cases of frothy bloat crop up this year. The interesting thing is that it’s appearing in regular ol’ lambs nursing on their mothers, at the age of 3-4 weeks, when they are just starting to transition to real ruminating. I’m used to seeing it in bottle lambs trained to drink of the “milk bar” bucket. They are prone to bloat because of their gorging habit when the bucket is re-filled with milk. But I’ve never seen it before in regular, non-grain-fed lambs, and I can’t find any documentation to explain it.
Frothy bloat is also common when sheep of any age graze a lot of clover. But the pasture my sheep are on has very little clover. So, it’s a mystery to me why they would be getting this. I assume it’s a result of really good eating, both from milk and grass. Our grass is going bananas in this weather, which is probably fuelling excellent milk production, as well as feeding the lambs some prime forage. Sometimes I snack on the inner reeds of our orchard grass when I’m out in the pasture; and right now, the sugar content is so high, it’s as sweet as an apple!
Frothy bloat is very telltale: foam exudes from their mouths and nostrils like a volcano. They cough and sputter and shake their heads, trying to rid themselves of the foam overload. It’s quite distressing to them, as evidenced by the fact that they are easy to catch. They are so preoccupied with the sensation of drowning in foam spew, that they have a hard time running with the herd, or paying attention to their surroundings.
It is not to be confused by the sight of a little milk froth in the corner of the mouth of a lamb that has just nursed. The difference is that lambs with a little milk drool act casual. Lambs with frothy bloat are acting like they feel like they’re gonna die- like any of us would feel and act if we had massive amounts of foam uncontrollably emanating from our throats.
The treatment is very simple. A quick syringe full of oil (I use olive oil, just because that’s what we have in our kitchen) settles the bubbling right down- literally within a minute or two. It’s just like putting oil in dishwater- the suds dissipate instantly. People who grain-feed lambs sometimes suggest feeding baking soda, which raises the pH in the rumen to offset the potential impact of acidosis. But this is not a concern for me since my lambs only consume grass and milk.
I suspect that most lambs recover from this spontaneously on their own. But it does seem to me that there is risk of choking, or aspirating enough fluid as to trigger pneumonia. So, I treat it when I see it, just to be on the safe side; and because it offers such instant relief from distress.
May 11, 2013 at 2:34 pm
thanks for the info. I have never seen it in my sheep.
May 12, 2013 at 1:17 am
Thankfully I have not seen it either, though now that i know about it i may recognise it if i do see it, mine are getting so fat and chubby the freezer lambs are almost ready! So far the pasture has been great! c
May 12, 2013 at 3:44 am
Cecilia- glad your grass is going good too, it’s going like gangbusters for us! I have a ways to wait for freezer lambs tho!
May 12, 2013 at 3:15 pm
Yuck! Poor buggers eating good grass. LOL. But it must be so scary for them to suddenly be choking.
A lot of our grass is drying up (lack of hummus to hold moisture). Where the alpacas concentrated potty breaks, we have lush stuff, little islands in the midst of fractured clay and stubby brown grass. Look forward to the year when there’s enough manure mixed in to get through dry spells like this.
May 16, 2013 at 12:36 am
Thank you for this post. Our two bottle feeders are slowly getting introduced and developing their rumens. Nice to see photos and learn of quick remedies. You have an amazing blog!
May 16, 2013 at 4:11 am
Thank you violicious!
June 29, 2013 at 5:29 pm
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June 28, 2014 at 5:11 am
Thanks for this post, Michelle. I didn’t have it last year, but this year one ewe lamb seems to be dealing with it. Normal elimination, but came in off grazing last night foamy and distressed. After being in the pen for 24 hours she seemed fine, but came in tonight with the same symptoms. Time to go round her up and give her some oil. I will probably also do a bit of baking soda too, as I do feed a small amount of grain (enough to get them all penned every night).
Thanks again,
Maureen
June 28, 2014 at 5:30 am
Glad it was helpful Maureen!
September 11, 2015 at 6:45 am
Hey there. Today I found a lamb that was frothing at the mouth and acting very docile. I caught the poor thing and it had labored breathing with a heavy phlegm feel. A few lambs are managing to get through the fence and eat the road side grass that has not been touched for months.
I had to kill the lamb because by the time I put it on the quad and had it at the shed it was almost dead.
Any advice would be helpful. Is it possible the other labs that escaped and ate the mature grass may need monitoring? The lambs are around 4 weeks old and weening.
September 11, 2015 at 3:21 pm
Chris, sorry to hear you lost one! Now that you know you have potential for frothy bloat, I’d keep a small syringe of cooking oil in your gear when you head out to pasture so you can treat them very quickly. At least for me, it’s very treatable and they instantly recover- literally miraculously within less than a minute of treatment. If you can visualize what’s happening in there, “soap bubbles” are filling up the rumen, and pushing up against the valve at the top of the rumen, and spilling up into the esophagus. It makes it hard to breathe, and they can aspirate the bubbles into their lungs, especially if they are “jostled.” So fast treatment is critical.
As far as what causes it, it’s usually rich feed of some kind. Given that your lambs are only 4 weeks old, they aren’t digesting much forage yet, so I’d be more inclined to attribute it to really good mother’s milk. It happens a lot for me with bottle lambs that gorge milk all at once, but I have had it happen on young single lambs that have access to a lot of dam’s milk. Over-mature grass I wouldn’t expect to cause it, with forage, it’s more very rich, young growth and legumes that’ll trigger it.
February 24, 2017 at 8:25 am
Thank you Michelle. You have just saved my 6 month old hand reared lamb who has over eaten (we have excessive grass this spring and summer in NZ) and was very distressed by the amount of froth (as was I). Volcano is a very apt description. I was amazed to see that after one drench (10ml syringe) with the solution, our lamb just wanted to drink the rest on his own!
February 24, 2017 at 5:53 pm
Yay, Ange, I’m glad it worked! It sure is a strange manifestation, isn’t it?
March 13, 2017 at 8:01 pm
hi there, i only just found this info tho it is some years old as what you describe is exactly what i was looking for a remedy for- but it is not actually frothy bloat as such. The symptoms you describe (and what was happening with my adult goat who gorged on a load of fresh dandiion and dock leaves) is an immediate response to greenery and is excess saliva and stomach acid production. It is more “choke” than “bloat”- you might see it in sheep guzling down grain and suddenly they stop, walk backwards and start coughing up foam. I dont know why it happens but it is not proper bloat. The oil is a great idea to burst all those foamy bubbles. In my case i had antacid milk of magnesia and was surprised that my goat was almost immediately relieved of her symptoms (looking ill and desperately trying to swallow down the rising foam i could hear bubbling in her throat). However I did once have a bottle lamb die of “frothy bloat” (as diagnosed by the vet i took her to early that night). This lamb had NO foam emanating from her mouth or nose, but her rumen/ stomach was bloated. I had only ever treated adult bloat (grain bloat) but it is not effective for frothy bloat. The vet put a tube down to try to expell the trapped gas but the foam blocked it and thats what makes it impossible for the gas to be expelled out the mouth- hence this being real frothy bloat. The lamb sadly died. it is not easy to treat as the animal dies of trapped rumenal gas which can not be voided by mouth (or a cannula into the rumen- again it gets blocked by the foam). There are now anti foaming agents that can help break the foam bubbles down (a product called “Burp” in this country). However the situation that you described, and which i was also researching often does, as you said, sort itself out without treatment (ie the animal coughs up the foam and the food item itself) BUT without treatment (and sometimes even with-see above) an animal with true frothy bloat will die-and that is the reason i am writing to you just to say please dont give people the impression that this treatment is for true frothy bloat, it is better termed “frothy choke”- because i know them to be 2 different things. many thanks.
March 24, 2017 at 4:31 am
Be sure to vaccinate with CDT and adding baking soda to the oil can help too. Blessings. 😊
September 4, 2017 at 5:41 pm
Helen, thanks for your comments. Definitely “choke” can happen when they are gulping grain, and it looks similar, with a lot of saliva. But I find with choke, you can also tell they are swallowing and swallowing, trying to move that stuck piece of whatever. Where as when it’s just froth coming up from the stomach, they are more just coughing, trying to expel all the foam, but not swallow. And some of the diagnosis has to come from environmental evaluation- for me, my lambs aren’t on grain or eating anything that is likely to lodge. But if this manifestation happens minutes after feeding grain, then choke is the more likely diagnosis. For choke, I would try to massage the throat to help the animal move the lodged object downward. Though a syringe of oil or other smooth liquid may also help the muscles move the object through the passage.
I think it is true that sometimes animals that have frothy bloat don’t manage to start expelling the froth orally, but rather it just moves immediately to the stage where the airways are blocked and they die of suffocation.
September 4, 2017 at 5:49 pm
Joy, baking soda is really meant more to treat acidosis, it raises the rumen pH when a heavy grain diet has caused too acid of an environment. There might be a tenuous relationship between the two, in that over-feeding grain can cause a situation where the rumen microbes can’t keep up with digesting it, it starts to ferment, creating acids, which then kill off some of the microbes. This action could lead to excess gas production (similar to gas production in a dead animal, causing it to balloon up), which relates to bloat. But acidosis is generally not the primary cause of bloat, in either form. Bloat is more of a complex brew of chemistry that causes excess production of gasses, either in free form, or in froth form.
As far as CDT vaccines go, I think they are also unrelated to bloat. The clostridium family of bacteria can cause a neurotoxin situation in the body, leading to rapid death. Clostridium perfringens types C and D are bacteria that are normal in the intestines, but can sometimes proliferate in a high nutrition diet, and tip the balance in toxicity. And, of course, clostridium tetani (tetanus) everyone is familiar with, a bacteria that’s common in the soil and can enter through a wound and cause toxicity. But these are a separate subject from the root causes of bloat.
March 12, 2019 at 3:38 am
I just had both of my bottle lambs go suddenly from yelling for milk to coughing and sneezing (one, more mucus than foam, the other, as you said, like a volcano!) By the time I got back out with some oil (and amount would be a lovely idea. I have syringes in 3cc, 6cc, and 12cc, plus the big ones for tube feeding, so an idea of volume would be good) they were both looking good, and the one who was so foamy, drank the oil very promptly. The other seemed to have recovered before I came in. These are babies only on Land-o-Lakes milk replacer, hay, and some feed. I am hoping to build the creep tomorrow, so they can have starter feed as well
March 12, 2019 at 4:09 am
Thanks for your comment Cameron, I’m glad your lambs did fine! The amount is kind of arbitrary and depends on the size of the lamb. I try to visualize how big the stomach is, and make sure I’m putting enough in that it’s gonna create a nice “oil slick” on the surface. So, like a 10 lb lamb, his little stomach would be the size of a small water balloon, so I’d prolly only do 3ml of oil. But a big 50 lb lamb, I’d be inclined to do more, 12cc would be good. When you visualize what oil does in a sink full of dish soap suds, though, it doesn’t take much oil to cut the suds, and that’s what we’re trying to achieve…
August 19, 2019 at 12:33 pm
My lamb at 5 months old and back in mid July, it has diarrhea. And then found foaming in these couple of weeks together with a bloat and not able to jump up and down now, sick-like. I tried oil and baking soda, but in vain. I put it on ciprofloxacin, smecta and kaolin, its feces get back to normal.
Today I find the muscle just underneath its ears twitching uncontrollably and its muscles are hot. Yet temperature measures at 39 degree celsius. While other lambs don’t twitch like it and muscles are warm.
Last month end, I got a 6 months old girl lamb died, unsure if it is enterotoxaemia. Might this one get infected of the same unknown disease?
Any problem you may think of the twitching? It is skinny but bloat. I don’t know how to do, please help!
August 20, 2019 at 5:12 am
May, that sounds complicated. What I usually find in poor doers is that it’s not just one thing, it’s several. So they may have pneumonia and a worm load, or low-grade acidosis and an intestinal infection. Once their immune system is compromised, then everything gets them at once. So you can get distracted trying to diagnose and treat one thing while something else kills them. For cases where I’m not sure, I treat for everything: triple de-worm with all three classes of de-wormer, treat for coccidia (a protozoa, not a “worm”), treat with strong, broad-spectrum antibiotics, give vitamin B injections, remove carbohydrate/grain feeds to eliminate acidosis, and to boost protein with really nice alfalfa to help the immune system and body recover.
To prevent further losses, you may want to take the cost hit and engage the help of a veterinarian. Definitely when you have a lamb die, have a vet teach you how to do a necropsy, and eventually you can do them on your own. This will save you a lot of wasted time on wrong diagnoses, because those can lead you down wrong paths of prevention and treatment, only to keep having lambs die while you figure out what’s really killing them. It is really hard to guess what killed a lamb unless you open them up and look, and often when you do, it’s not what you thought.
Hope that helps a little bit!
September 2, 2019 at 11:20 am
that is really good advice michelle- i do the blanket medicine cabinet thing too, sadly lost a couple of lambs (one a 3 weeks old cade bloated- even though ive successfully treated bloat before , one a 4 month old picked up from a neighbouring farm found starving, again i have saved them in a starved state before). It is slightly reassuring that you mentuon the “many things affecting them at once” – i have no vet close at hand (remote island) and i wish i had learnt how to PM (i did want to be a vet years ago) so i could put my mind at rest and know what kills them- this unknowning state it difficult to deal with- exactly as you say- because i feel i have no idea how to stop it happening again when i dont know what “it” was.
September 2, 2019 at 4:45 pm
Helen, I think doing post-mortems is more about experience, and just doing them over and over. With time, your eye gets trained to what is normal and abnormal, and you start to notice things like enlarged lymph nodes etc. that give clues to what was going on. I really only spend about 15 minutes on them, and it’s worth the time spent.
October 23, 2019 at 10:33 pm
Thank you! My sheep was doing this and I found my answer here moments after. I did not have a proper syringe but I think I managed to get over a teaspoon or more in and within seconds she stopped heaving and was back to grazing a minute later!
October 24, 2019 at 3:39 am
Jon, glad it worked!
March 5, 2022 at 11:44 pm
Thankyou I just gave the oil and it did the trick. Saved its life. Hope it comes good now.
March 6, 2022 at 2:06 am
Glad it worked Belinda!
July 30, 2022 at 12:34 am
This was so helpful. Thanks so much!
July 30, 2022 at 5:44 am
You’re welcome Kristen!
October 16, 2022 at 6:25 pm
We’re new to sheep. I just read your post in a panic cause my ewe was frothing at the mouth. We finally grabbed her, shoved the syringe down her throat with the olive oil. Turns out she had a nut in her mouth she was chewing on 🤦🏻♀️. I swear it looked just like your pictures.