Sheep Services
Shepton Vets provide veterinary services to a variety of sheep farming enterprises across Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire. We enjoy working with flocks of sheep however large or small. Many of the team keep their own sheep, giving them a taste of what it is like to be a sheep farmer.
Rosie Lyle
Bibby Thomas
Kate Travitsky
Elly Cockman
Services that we offer sheep farmers across the South West;
- Bespoke Flock Health Planning
- Flock level or targeted disease testing with the support of our Vet Techs for sample collection
- Ram fertility testing and semen assessments
- Surgeries on farm or at the practice (for example vasectomies and caesareans)
- In house lab offering quick turnaround worm and cocci counts.
- In house postmortem service
- Tup testing and ram vasectomy days
- Training courses such as Mastering Medicines and Lambing courses
- Competitively priced medicines available to collect from 3 locations and a delivery service available
- 365 days a year, 24/7 emergency service provided by our own team of vets.
Health planning
We want to work in partnership with you to develop an individual, preventative Flock Health Plan that improves the productivity of your flock while being fully Red Tractor compliant. We can use a fully funded Animal Health and Welfare Pathway visit to focus on a particular area of flock health you would like to improve. Visits can be used to ensure you are implementing the most effective parasite control programme on farm or that you have appropriate and proportionate biosecurity measures in place for when you introduce any new animals onto your holding for example.
Disease testing and poor performance investigations
We work with lots of high health flocks, assisting with blood sampling for various significant sheep diseases. We encourage flocks to partake in routine surveillance of diseases such as Johnes and Maedi Visna (MV) in their cull ewes and for flocks to carry out pre lambing nutritional assessments. Vet Techs are on hand to take samples, keeping cost down.
We are confident that we will be able to support you when flock performance is not where you would like it to be. We support farmers in reducing flock level lameness by ensuring lesion appropriate treatment and control measures are in place. We are here to help, and advice should you ever need to navigate an abortion storm or need to investigate poor reproductive performance. Our team has a wealth of experience we can draw on and we always try to get to the bottom of problems, working proactively, problem solving with you with challenges arise.
Lab services
We offer a range of in-house testing from our laboratory in Shepton Mallet, results are reported to clients by our experienced vets. Basic biochemistry profiles can be run rapidly to help guide our diagnosis, same day worm and cocci counts are available. We encourage responsible parasite control and try to make it as easy as possible for clients to implement regular sampling by offering discounted sampling through our Worm Egg Count Club. Clients can collect worm egg counting kits that aim to make sampling as easy as possible while providing samples that accurately reflect the parasite burden within their flock.
On-site treatment facility
At our Shepton Mallet practice we have a treatment facility this allows sheep to be brought in for cost – effective consultations and procedures. We lamb ewes on site and when necessary, perform caesareans for a fixed fee. This facility is regularly used for ram fertility testing, vasectomies and for postmortems.
Medicines
We supply fairly priced medicines to our clients from our large, fully stocked pharmacy in Shepton Mallet. We have daily deliveries meaning we can get anything not in stock within 24 hours. XL Vets membership supports our medicine procurement enabling us to source alternative products quickly should there be supply issues. Our delivery van is out on the road daily meaning we can deliver to your farm or drop medicines to our daily Wells practice drop off point. Clients can order medicines anytime of day or night via Whatsapp Whatsapp medicine order 07592 307 394.
