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Working Dog Run – A pre-season check

Get your best employees a Warrant of Fitness this winter. Have you opted in for our Working Dog Run this winter? A program where our vets and nurses come out and gave your dog team a Warrant of Fitness. Your team is an important asset in the yards and out in the paddock, so planning ahead with their health is essential.If this is something you wish to sign-up for, please contact us on 0800 VET SOUTH or head to this sign up form. Our teams are heading out at the end of June, the start o...

Salmonella Brandenburg

Salmonella Brandenburg abortions were first seen in sheep in mid-Canterbury back in 1996. Since then a cyclical pattern has been seen, with outbreaks mainly in Otago and Southland, and as of 2021 it still remains a South Island disease. It is a bacterial disease that causes late-term abortions, sickness and death. We see it mostly in early spring (late pregnancy) and the outbreaks are sudden and can have a devastating impact - up to 15% can abort and up to 50% of aborting ewes can die.Gribbles l...

Ten-In-One vaccine nipped sudden deaths in the bud

When it comes to stopping sudden death losses in cattle, there’s only one thing that puzzles Lumsden farmer Paul Waller. Why, he asks, don’t more farmers understand there’s a very simple way to help prevent the losses. Paul runs sheep, beef and deer on about 400 hectares of mainly flat and rolling country with some tussock on the higher slopes. The sheep comprise 200 of the easy-care Wiltshire breed “to tidy up around the sheds and give us some mutton”.With deer he’s pulled back from...

Lambing kit checklist

We all know that the foundation for good animal health is a constant commitment to practices year round such as good nutrition, vaccinating and parasite control. The focus of this article is to identify a few immediate bits of equipment you may need during lambing (especially with our unpredictable weather) to set you up for a good year....

Managing hogget mating

The decision to mate hoggets can be beneficial for increasing annual lamb production and ewe lifetime performance, if they are properly managed. If hoggets are poorly managed from mating through to two-tooths this will not only have repercussions for them the following season but may also negatively affect their lifetime performance.Feed is the most important factor when it comes to mated hogget management. Mated hoggets should be gaining 135g/day over winter. Hoggets must not only receive appro...

Metacam and sheep

An anti-inflammatory product that has proven results in the welfare and recovery of animals. So are you using it in your sheep? Did you know that pain will reduce any animal's desire to eat? This will of course lead to a decrease in growth and production. Examples of painful experiences our sheep will go through at various times of the season include bearings, prolonged lambing/assisted lambing, lameness and mastitis. Did you also know that we have a long-last effective pain relief option that i...

Lepto in livestock: Why vaccinate?

Leptospirosis is an infectious disease transmitted from animals to humans, we call this a zoonotic disease. It also passes very easily from animal to animal and is prevalent amongst both farmed and wild animals. It spreads easily, thrives in wet conditions and can survive for months. That means protecting ourselves and our animals is important.Protecting your beef cattle against lepto is important as they can pick it up through contaminated water or contaminated pasture. Bringing in outside anim...

Supplementing trace elements through winter

Matt from Virbac explains why supplementing through winter can set up your stock for success in the spring. Ensuring that breeding cows and ewes are well supplemented through winter and leading up to calving/lambing, will maximise the transfer of trace elements through the placenta and milk. Sheep mainly require selenium and vitamin B12, while in cattle the priorities are copper and selenium. In ewes SMARTSHOT B12 Plus SE is an option to provide both B12 and selenium throughout pregnancy, a...

Working dogs in winter

How to keep your dogs happy and healthy in cooler conditions. The temperature's dropping often means it's time to make sure we have enough firewood and our winter jacket doesn’t have any holes in it. Have you thought about your team of dogs too? We look into the simple ways of keeping your dogs healthy and warm during winter....

Feeding your assets: Ewe management

Preparing your ewes now for a successful lambing is essential to ensure you have the most robust lamb and ewe unit when we arrive at lambing time. Your ewes are mated and now they carry the precious income for next year. At this time our focus is all about: Lamb survivalEwe lactation To ensure our ewes and lambs have the best shot, we need to feed correctly for good placenta development. The placenta develops over the first 60-80 days of gestation. Ewes should be fed at maintenance levels throug...

The Swede Safari

Every year a group of 5th-year vet students from Massey University in Palmerston North make the pilgrimage down south. Stopping at various other vet clinics along their journey the students arrive at VetSouth Winton as their final destination ready to participate in the famous “Swede Safari”.During their time here students get to enjoy a variety of different activities, all intended to give them a taste of life in a clinic. This a variety of activities are covered, from the technical realiti...

Southland farmers using drone for good

Local sheep and beef farmers Nick and Alexis Wadworth have been using a drone on their farm for the past few years. What may have been seen by some farmers as an unnecessary expense, a drone has proved a great tool for animal welfare on farm for them. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? You might have been surprised a few years ago to see a farmer using a drone on their farm, but with the accessibility of the technology increasing, a drone has become a useful piece of kit for farmers in New Zealand.Ove...

Poison of the season: Rat bait

Every autumn and early winter we see a number of cases of rat bait poisoning in dogs, either via direct ingestion of the rat bait or less often by ingestion of rats/mice that have died from eating the bait. It is clear that dogs find these baits very tasty. Cats on the other hand are fussy about what they eat and prefer their prey to be alive and therefore are less likely to be poisoned. ...

Ukraine's Paws & Peeps Fundraiser with New Zealand vets

Times are tough at the moment, but can be and are even tougher for others.With the current situation in Ukraine, we did our bit with a fundraiser from NZ to support animal welfare and those that provide it in Ukraine.What is more important in this situation: animals or people? It’s a tough call, but we know we can do a little something to ease the suffering so far away.We are stoked to share that our business along with our generous staff, clients and the NZ community, we raised $3,000 in just...

VetSouth proud to support Meat the Need

VetSouth are proud to be a sponsor of the Meat the Need charity, a kiwi based operation aiming at connecting the dots and getting New Zealand meat into our food banks. Whilst there has been a need for a charity like this, to date, there has been a missing link between the willing farmer with livestock and the community organisations with the demands for a regular, reliable supply.Here at VetSouth, we are Here for Good, which means we are here for the long term and for the good of our community. ...

New dental equipment

Our workload in equine dentistry has been increasing each year. To help us provide a more comprehensive service we are looking to replace some of our older equipment. We are hoping to soon have available a new HDE set of motorised dental equipment arriving from Germany. This ergonomically friendly equipment has a more comprehensive float head arrangement which allows for better access in the mouth. It will come with an array of float handle systems for different uses. The motor is housed in a ve...

Autumn and winter parasite management

Parasite control is an important part of your horse’s annual health management. For all parasite control programmes, we have three main aims:Decrease the risk of parasite related diseasesControl shedding of eggsTo maintain the efficacy of the worming drugs that we have and prevent further development of resistance. This third point is one of the main reasons that we recommend drenching horses based on the result of a faecal egg count (FEC) test. It is recommended to drop off a small amount of ...

Beyond the drought

After what seems to have been the summer that never ended, the Equine Vets have been kept busy around the region tending to all things horsey. Like other livestock species in the region, the dry summer has presented many challenges for horses from both a health and a performance point of view. While our spring was fairly typical of a Southland spring (following on from what seemed to be the longest, wettest winter) our breeding season got off to a pretty reliable start. The S...

Is your horse winter ready?

Southland traditionally has a mild, warm wet Autumn that can last well into May (and in recent years into June), and these weather conditions are ideal for the development and survival of parasite larvae, fungal and bacterial infections. In Southland, we traditionally see an increase in colitis (severe acute diarrhoea) in the autumn months. The exact cause is often not determined but may be due to a bacterial colitis (e.g. salmonella) or due to parasitism. This year with...

The Coronary Band – the lifeblood to the horse’s hoof wall

The coronary band is the junction between the hair-producing skin of the horse's lower limb and the hoof wall. The coronary epidermis is a lifelong cellular proliferating zone, producing keratinocytes that subsequently undergo maturation and ultimately cellular death, to form the middle horn of the wall. The constant adding of keratinized epidermis at the coronary segment causes the middle layer to continuously move downward, past the distal phalanx to reach the ground surface. Average hoof grow...

Video Endoscopy: Allowing us all to have a good look

We are able to utilise this fantastic piece of equipment to view the upper and lower respiratory tract of horses with the 1.5m endoscope able to view the bifurcation of the lungs. Imaging the guttural pouches and upper airways is now much more rewarding when everyone can see what is going on. This piece of equipment also allows us to guide treatment in a much more user friendly and accurate manner. The 1.5m scope can also be used to look into the bladder and the uterus and has been use...

Dairy cow nutrition around drying off

At the time of writing of this article, the Southern regions are quite desperate for rain, and if we don’t get any decent moisture soon this article will be less relevant as cows will start to drop in milk production naturally due to a lack of feed availability. For now, let’s stick with the “glass half full'' scenario that we will get rain soon and that the grass will grow and that we therefore will deal with our “normal” southern autumn high protein grass leading to dry-off. The dry ...

Dry off ready?

Winter is coming! Lucky for many of us that means a later alarm clock in the morning and some time off the farm. But until we take those milking aprons off yet, Vet Dan has some handy reminders as we approach winter to ensure your herd are prepared for a successful Dry Off....

The mystery of the coughing cow

Vet Keryn came across an interesting case of a coughing cow on a farm recently and her investigations lead to an interesting diagnosis. I was recently called to a farm to see three sick cows that had suddenly gone off their milk and were frothing at the mouth. However, when someone tried to get them out of the paddock, two of them made a miraculous recovery and refused to play the game, so only one cow was at the shed when I arrived. The cow in the yards was reluctant to walk and had her neck st...

What's up with my 6-week in-calf rate?

Vet Bianca has dived deep into the data from across our farms and is disecting what the data means from the 6 Week In-Calf Rate (ICR). We have collated data from the Fertility Focus Reports of our VetSouth farms to analyse regional in-calf rate trends. There have been some pleasing results this year. The average 6 week in-calf rate across VetSouth this year was 68.4%, which is an increase of 2% compared with last year. This is the biggest jump we have seen in several years and is the first time ...