Oh God it is one of those weeks. All alpaca patients are doing well but another turned up yesterday. This time it was a yearling boy with fly strike on his back leg. All the young boys were in the yard and what you see is what looks like wet fibre when the rest of the animal is dry. On closer inspection there was blood and maggots.
I don’t know what it is about maggots but they are absolutely disgusting. Chas put the boy in the shearing harness and set to work cutting off as much fibre as possible from his lower leg and washing off the obvious maggots. Thanks goodness for Crovect, you spray it on and all the nasty little blighters that are inside the leg come wriggling out and die. We then put him and a mate in the hay barn for a couple of hours. Into the shearing harness again for more Crovect to make sure there were no more. Left him for another few hours. Then at tea time back in the shearing harness for a thorough wash with Hibi scrub, Teramycin spray, more Crovect and an antibiotic injection. It looks as though he had a cut on his hock and of course that’s where the eggs were laid. He’ll be on antibiotics for five days and we’ll see whether the fly strike has destroyed his joint or whether it recovers.