Choosing Lambs for Artificial Rearing

• In a system where prolific ewes have produced too many lambs for each lamb to receive enough milk, the extra lamb should be given supplemental milk or removed from its dam entirely. The preference is to foster, but this may be impossible.
• Typically, if a ewe has too many lambs a system must be developed to determine which lamb(s) is/are removed.
• The best rule of thumb is to remove the most different one, with size and gender (in order) being the determining factors. For example: in a set of female triplets, if two are small and one is big: remove the largest one in a set of quadruplets, two are male and two are female, and one male is tiny: remove him. If the ewe is only capable of raising two: remove both males
• It is however advised for many individuals interested in generating replacement females to avoid removing the ewe lambs, as comparisons must then be made within the flock on lambs that have had unequal growth opportunities. By the same reasoning, a potential ram should also not be artificially reared.