Background: This year's lambs really want to stick their heads through the 4x4in metal
fence to nibble the garden. Some of the lambs are out of new breeding stock that carries scur horn genes (otherwise excellent animals). We don't do any disbudding so everyone's growing whatever kind of horns they got.
A 4.5 month old lamb tore a horn off, I spotted him looking like a horror movie with blood down his face. I was soo relieved when I got closer and saw it was a partially torn off horn and not a bunch of torn flesh from some kind of predator attack. At this point I've seen a mature ram with small 2-4 inch scurs have his knocked off on multiple occasions, and they're just bloody, quickly scabbing stumps. So I thought, well this guy
should be fine. Caught him, rinsed the blood off this face and upon closer inspection the horn had pulled up and off the attachment point, but was still attached less than a cm of connection and pointing upright but tweaked to the side.
I made a bad decision and let him keep it and go about his business thinking he'd probably just knock it off himself and so I didn't need remove it. Well after 4-5 days I saw him covered in blood again and the horn was then dangling. So we caught him and I removed the horn with a sharp knife, it was attached by maybe 4 mm of living tissue. I put a yarrow poultice on it temporarily, the bleeding stopped really quick and I blasted the whole area with an
irrigation syringe until I was satisfied that nothing else would be washed away. I then covered the whole area with Cottonwood bud tincture (he actually calmed down as the cottonwood was being applied which gave me confidence that it was helping).
My big question: Has anyone dealt with a significant wound on livestock who are on pasture in a wet environment
using natural treatments?
*no industrial farm store stuff please.
I'm worried about the wet environment and infection. The site would be very hard to get any kind of bandage or wrap to stay. My next thought is to mix up strong tea tree&water combo and spray that around the area when I re-apply the cottonwood bud tincture to the wound.