You guys have made me feel much better about the decision, to be sure!
I will tell you just what I did with the little fellow last night and today.....last night I didn't feel he had gotten much from Blossom so I gave him about a pint of warmed Blossom milk with a little brown sugar and half a Lomotil! I had these laying around and they are probably way outdated, but I thought--its worth a shot to slow down those bowels! Lomotil is an anti-diarrheal agent.
I did the dehydration test on him last night before bed and right after his feeding and he had a 3-4 sec. lapse for the tenting of the skin. You see, I read about scours on the net and they described the different stages and treatment of dehydration on there and told about tenting, or pinching, the neck hide up and seeing how many seconds it took for it to snap back.....basically just what we do with human patients.
According to this scale, Jerky was pretty dehydrated but not near critical yet. This morning, to my relief, he has no tenting of the skin and he took to the teat without any encouragement. His stool is a little less liquid, still a little bloody, so I gave him another half pint of brown sugar milk with a little Lomotil today. He is stronger and more aggressive on the teat, still bright-eyed but tires easily.
None of the treatments advocated slowing down the hyperactive bowels and I wondered why. Its the loss of this fluid that causes the dehydration process, so why not slow down the bowel motility a little until the fluids can be re-absorbed, if possible? Just musing.....
Might thin down some yogurt tonight and see if we can't reculture this little one's bowels.
T-Bone is a voracious udder killer and we hesitate to let him at Blossom free choice for fear that we will walk up in the orchard and find only a shriveled skin, some hooves and horns left of the old dear!
We gave the boys these very food oriented names as we fully intend them to fulfill their destiny in the food chain. No emotional, sweetsy, meaningful names for these little meat racks, no sirree!
I can tell that Eli is already getting a little fond of T-bone and Jerky, as they allow us to pet them and scratch them and Shade is Miss Princess Shade and would never deign to allow a human to paw at her body!
She definitely acts like she thinks she is royalty and above the law.....she jumped over a 3 ft gate last night and rejoined her mother, after passing through a two strand electric wire enclosure! :/