Pooky the lamb dies twice and survives
Coming back from the dead isn't something many can claim, but pet lamb Pooky has done it not once, but twice - and all in half an hour. The six-week-old Wiltshire purebred was enjoying an episode of Rural Delivery in Upper Moutere, near Nelson, with adopted mum Carol Martin on Saturday when he started choking.
"My brother was up from Christchurch, he came to see Pooky and he's been a farmer and a top livestock representative for years," Carol said, "Him and I were watching Rural Delivery and I was giving Pooky a bottle and all of a sudden milk started coming out of his nose. Within two seconds he had a mini fit, hit the ground and his tongue went blue and was hanging out. Rob said 'I think he's died', and he had."
Carol said a cool-headed Rob "put his face over Pooky's nose and sucked stuff out of it" and then started blowing air in.
"He wasn't going to have a beer before he went back to Christchurch but he said 'I think I'm going to need that beer'."
But even after the mouth-to-mouth Pooky wasn't quite right.
"He was dead for probably over a minute," Carol said.
"Then he was very woozy and couldn't get on his feet and he started collapsing and he died again. My brother got Pooky's back to his chest and gave him the Heimlich manouevre and saved him again."
Carol said vets didn't believe Rob had been able to save Pooky twice after he'd got milk in his lungs, as lambs usually die within seconds.
Pooky, a premature lamb that was adopted by Carol and her husband Stu after being abandoned at birth, was now fit as fiddle and coming to the end of a course of penicillin, Carol said. If anything, he was living too much of a luxurious life weighing in at 11.5 kilograms and sporting a rather round belly.
"He's a shocking little guts and that's why it happened, because he has the appetite of a fully grown ram," Carol said.
Carol was trying to wean Pooky off bottles onto a more fitting diet of water and grass, but she said "he thinks water is for those other white things up there" and he had taken much more of a liking to her flower garden and succulents.
"He just eats the flowers, the white daisies, the dandelions, he goes past all the lovely grass and he eats all the flowers, don't you you little ratbag."
The "naughty wee thing" had also found a soft spot for Farmbake cookies.
"He doesn't eat them but he spreads them, whips in grabs the bag and he's gone.
"He's so naughty, if anybody leaves a pantry door even slightly open he gets in and he gets everything out that he can possibly reach, bottles of vinegar, anything, it goes on the floor and he drags things around."
Carol said Pooky would eventually be introduced the ewes to "find out he's got a purpose".
"At some stage he'll realise sheep are actually nice. It might take a sheep being in season to find out that something smells OK about those white things."
But until then, Pooky the miracle lamb would continue to share the Martins' bed in the mornings.
Written by Anna Bradley-Smith. First appeared on Stuff.co.nz
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