Aggressive flock management: How to avoid foot problems

Don't let rot get a foot in your door!

By Lisa Roskopf
Hawks Mountain Ranch
Gaston, OR

Flock management that focuses on prevention is one of the key ingredients to operations that result in maximizing profits and making the best use of the shepherd's time. There is no place that this is truer than in prevention of foot rot.

If you listen to shepherds describing some of their most expensive and time consuming flock management problems to solve; invariably foot rot is near the top of the list. I have listened to some real horror stories about the lengths that some have had to go to get this insidious problem controlled. Hearing these tales of frustration from other shepherds is one of the things that has driven Hawks Mountain Ranch to institute an aggressive prevention program that up until now has been 100% effective.

Contagious hoof rot is an age-old malady of sheep and is currently a major production problem in many areas of the United States. Hoof rot is generally more prevalent in temperate climates and has become a widespread concern to western producers.
Our ranch is in the Willamette valley in Oregon where the wet climate can offer a particularly good environment for the bacteria to thrive.

Lameness is usually the most obvious sign of contagious foot rot in sheep, although not all sheep with early infections become lame. It may occur in more than 1 foot at the same time. The first visible lesion is a moist reddened area between the toes. Subsequently the infection spreads under the sole of the hoof, causing the undermining and separation of the horny tissues. A characteristic foul odor from the foot is common in hoof rot.

Foot rot is caused by an interaction involving two types of bacteria that grow in the areas of the foot where oxygen is excluded. The first organism is Fusobacterium necrophorum. It is a normal inhabitant of soil and sheep manure and is always present where sheep are raised. There is nothing you can do to prevent this from being present in your soil. Dichelobacter nodosus is the one necessary for transmission and is the one critical to avoid coming onto your property. Please note the key word here is avoid. Once this bacteria is on your property the task of controlling hoof rot becomes immensely more difficult and more chancy. The focus of this article is for those breeders who are not yet facing the difficulty or those people who very hard work have managed to eliminate this bacteria.

I have tried to detail the steps we have taken to avoid the introduction of the transmission bacteria Dichelobacter Nodosus onto our ranch. You may see some practices here that seem cumbersome and overkill. It is my belief that they are far easier that dealing with the problem if it does find it's way onto your property.

Human foot transmission
We require that anyone coming onto our farm wear our boots (currently we are experimenting with disposable boots that slip over one's shoes) before stepping foot on any area the sheep will travel. These offending bacteria can easily be born on the shoes/boots of visitors that come from infected ground. Unknowingly they may transfer those bacteria into your soil where it can reside in moist ground until picked up on the hoof of one of your animals. We keep a variety of sizes of boots and require that all visitors wear them.

Some people may say that they don't use their shoes or boots in areas of their farm that have animals. We still require them to where our boots. No exceptions. We have found people very cooperative when we've explained the reasons. There have been some occasions where the number of visitors has exceeded the number of pairs of boots we have. In those cases we have people go through a footbath of zinc sulfate and water mixture.

Animal foot transmission
Whenever one of our animals leaves the farm we drench the foot in a Zinc Sulfate solution prior to allowing the animal to step foot on the property. We quarantine the animals for 8 weeks until we are assured that they have arrived back at the ranch free of hoof rot or any other diseases that they may have picked up on their journey.
We would not ever buy an animal that we knew to have foot rot. However we use the same drenching and quarantine process for bringing new animals onto the farm. We repeatedly trim hoofs and examine carefully for any evidence. We repeat the drenching during this phase to give ourselves further assurance.

These two steps have effective at avoiding any footrot on our place. Although this does take some time in the explanations to visitors and in the quarantining for movement of animals onto the property, it is our belief that this is a lot less work and expense of trying to cope with the problem once you have it.