If you’ve been following us for a while, you may remember our Tunis ram named Raulie. Raulie was a special guy and lived out his days on our farm. I shared a little about his health is another post, but after finding a question about sheep spitting out cud on a Facebook sheep group I thought it might be useful for others if I detailed my experience.

In late November 2017, shortly after we started feeding hay for the winter season, Raulie began regurgitating large wads of his cud. He was born on Christmas and was just a few weeks from turning 12 years old.

I took this video of Raulie when he spit up his cud so I could send it to our vet before she came out to examine him.

After observing him and checking his vitals and teeth, our vet felt along Raulie’s throat. She felt a lump on his trachea and concluded that may be the cause of the regurgitation. Our vet mentioned the possibility of there being a tumor or growth in the rumen or other part of the digestive tract, but any further diagnosis would require more invasive, internal examinations. We decided we didn’t want to put Raulie through that.

Our vet prescribed 2 weeks of steroids to hopefully shrink the lump on Raulie’s trachea, but he bloated after a just a couple doses. We gave him a water and baking soda mixture by oral drenching gun to neutralize the gasses in his rumen and he recovered quickly but was unable to continue taking the steroids.

Instead of getting regular hay twice a day, Raulie was now to be fed hay pellets soaked in water 3 times per day. The hay in the pellets was chopped so small that we had no more issues with Raulie choking on or regurgitating his cud. He always came to us for his hay pellets and was in good body condition when we sheared in late February.

We did lose Raulie in March 2018, but he was active and bright-eyed even on the day he died. Changing his diet from hay to hay pellets gave him a few more quality months of life.