Cria death

Hi,
I have two females and a stud male. In 2008 one of my females had her first cria (my female was 4 years old at the time). The birth was normal and the baby seemed healthly – she was doing all the right things. Then when she was 11 days old, we found her dead in the field one morning. A post mortem showed she had died from E.coli.
This August my other female gave birth to her first cria. Again, all was going well. At 8 weeks the baby had some scour for about 48 hours. We had a dung sample tested and it showed coccidia which we treated (in conjunction) with our vet with a drench. The baby continued to do well, then at 3 months old, one morning seemed off-colour and 12 hours later she was dead. The post mortem this time revealed her death was due to the coccidia (despite the earlier treatment and our vet assuring us that all was well).
So, all the animals are wormed and vaccinated, including the babies, following the advice we can research ourselves and from our vet, their fields are kept clean, they are checked CONSTANTLY, and are well cared for – in short, we can't see where we are going wrong and are both devastated and bemused by the loss of our two babies.
So far, we've bred three crias and lost two.
My two females and stud male are all Roseland Llamas so had an excellent start in life.
I guess my question is this – do other breeders experience these problems with crias? I've seen no mention of cria death online, and everything I read talks only of the ease of breeding llamas!! I would welcome any thoughts regarding this issue. Are we doing something wrong? Have we simply been unlucky? While I realise that breeding animals and dealing with nature can sometimes be tough, we badly need some hope for the future of our little herd!! . Thank you. Ruth

Hi Ruth, so sorry your cria has died, it is heartbreaking. We had a female who began a decline at 3 months, she had had a difficult start as she was affected by fly strike two days after birth and so we had been keeping her in the stable every night. She took up the habit of going to the stable every night and all the others followed her!! We had put the rubber stable mats down and although we cleaned the stable daily, the mats became wet with urine. The vet found she was suffering from coccidia and was sure it was due to her spending so much time on the wet mats as he said lambs were susceptible when kept indoors with the ewes for a period of time. Treatment followed and she came through. I threw those mats away and disinfected the stable thoroughly!!

Vivienne Ives

Thanks Vivienne for your message – it's very good to hear a positive story of a youngster that has been ill but gone on to make a full recovery. Both our babies that died got ill so fast that it's made us pretty paranoid that once a youngster is displaying signs of illness, it's probably too late. Also, the one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that llamas are very good at hiding illness so by the time symptoms are visible things can be very bad. We worked so hard to save our baby that died this year and it does make you feel pretty hopeless, so it was good to hear that little ones do get better!!
Thanks again.