Pregnancy toxaemia or twin lamb disease is a metabolic disorder of late pregnancy that causes severe suffering and high mortality in sheep, yet is largely preventable through good nutritional management.
Pregnancy toxaemia causes profound suffering: ewes become progressively recumbent, lose coordination, and in untreated cases experience a deteriorating neurological state before death. The suffering is particularly acute because the condition develops over days and may not be recognised until advanced stages. The tragedy is that the condition is almost entirely preventable through systematic nutritional management in the 6-8 weeks before lambing. Farms that invest in body condition monitoring, scanning for litter size, and feeding to requirement have dramatically lower rates of this painful and fatal condition.