Sheep Rock, LLC: Veterinary Consulting, 35 Panhandle Road (2026)

18/03/2026

Six workshops in Feb and March this year, strategically planned right at the onset of kidding and lambing season. By far my two favorite were the technical skills workshops, one at Slough in MA and one at Echo in CT. We had small animal techs, large animal techs, 4-H kids, farmers from farms large and small, farmers from the newest newbies to the seen-it-all veterans, and researchers in attendance. My 👏🏻 hands-down 👏🏻 favorite 👏🏻 part 👏🏻 is the moment when your eyeballs light up as you hit that target for the first time, and we both know you can DEFINITELY do that again. Thank you to everyone who participated. Now let’s go forth and have a very quiet, boring, uneventful birthing season.

06/03/2026

Ok here we GO! March is upon us and for me that means 4am calls, 11pm calls, babies coming out of my ears, constant biohazard laundry and microwaved coffee. I’d like to remind everyone watching this account of a few crucial things as we head into the busiest emergency season of the year. ⭐️ If you are experiencing an emergency and you are one of my regular, full-service established clients, please call and leave a voicemail. You receive the fastest, most prioritized service. 🩶 If you are an emergency-only client experiencing an emergency, please call and leave a voicemail. You are the next in line for priority. 3️⃣ If you are not a client I have a relationship with, but your primary veterinarian is unable to see you or recommended you call me, please call and leave a voicemail naming your regular veterinarian, your town and the emergency situation you’re in. You are third in line for priority. 4️⃣ If you are not a client I have a relationship with, you have no other veterinary relationship, and you are experiencing an emergency, please call and leave a voicemail. Make sure you state your town and what the emergency situation is. You may be lowest on the priority list, however when it comes down to it, I don’t require a VCPR or a referral (it just helps if you have one or both), and I will see you if I can. 🛻 A couple other very important points before you scroll - I don’t go much further than 30-45 minutes of 06750, and I do NOT take HORSE cases. 💉 Now, stock up on l**e, check your emergency med kit, make some quick-defrost to-go meals, make sure your thermometer works, and save my number in your phone with a screenshot of the emergency farm call page at www.sheeprockvet.com/farmcalls.

25/02/2026

While my practice does NOT see horses, I do love to collaborate with veterinary professionals in all sections of vet med. Being a food animal vet, I’m always seeking ways to minimize the use of medications that result in drug residues. When I assessed this nice milking doe for a chronic soft tissue injury, I immediately knew Meg had the tools and the skills to make the best treatment plan for her recovery. Meg’s service Bilt Rite Equine has been able to deliver this doe with her highly certified services - red light therapy and massage. Fibrotic tissue injuries from chronic inflammation and disuse significantly benefit from both these modalities.

16/02/2026

A wholehearted thank you to everyone who has been to one of my workshops over the past two weeks (and more to come 😵‍💫😴). To me, workshop success is everyone leaving with at least one or two valuable pieces of new information, everyone getting to meet/connect with someone new, everyone getting to have a little fun. Yesterday in Goshen, CT at the lambing and kidding workshop we spent so much time talking about what could go wrong and how to deal with it, that I thought it might be nice to show you a normal, uneventful, beautiful calving today. So enjoy this (3x speed) of this first time momma Jersey. Notice how she takes plenty of time to rest between contractions. Also notice how every couple of minutes you see something NEW coming out, and at no point does she lose progress. Please feel free to comment if you want to share something you learned yesterday, or if you want to comment on this sweet momma. See you soon for technical skills training!

20/01/2026

Another case story from the field, tweaked for privacy. For a producer who raises 15,000 birds per year, waking up one day to dozens of birds acutely dead overnight, who were in great health yesterday, is prime “worst nightmare material.” Any great producer would do exactly what she did: call the state, call the vet, and submit birds for necropsy ASAP. The state swiftly tested and confirmed the flocks were negative for avian influenzas. The farm call came and went. With each day bringing dozens more mortalities, and the laboratory giving her a 6-8 week turnaround time, the birds couldn’t afford to wait.
This is how the situation fell into my lap, and I recognized the urgency and wanted to be as efficient and practical as possible. What strategies are most likely to yield accurate information the fastest? Have we run a simple f***l test? Most labs and practices should be able to run one in-house with a rapid turnaround time at minimal cost.

“After receiving little assistance from others, Dr. Masur took the time to listen carefully and understand the urgency of our situation. Her attention and responsiveness made a critical difference, and a simple $25 test proved to be lifesaving. We are deeply grateful for her professionalism, compassion, and dedication to patient care.”

With $25 and just a few hours, we had our answer. We ran the appropriate medication through the drinking system and within 48 hours mortalities tapered to a halt. Several weeks later, we received the final necropsy results and with it, the confidence of knowing that we targeted the correct issue. With herd-wide problems, my goal is to hit the target with accuracy and address the problem effectively. Neither myself nor the producer could tolerate losing more weeks and more birds. The lesson here was: ask the simple questions early, and leave no stone unturned!

[Unrelated pic]

14/01/2026

Sheep & Goat Farmer’s Ed classes available in February!
Day 1: Lambing & Kidding - includes maternal preparation for conception, gestation, and birth as well as dystocia (problems with labor and delivery) management. The hands-on component will involve using a birthing simulator. We will move on to a lecture on Biosecurity where we will discuss how to identify and prevent various contagious diseases. We’ll end Day 1 with a hands-on tabletop exercise on disease exposure in ag communities.
Day 2: We start with a lecture on First Aid for farm animals, with an emphasis on what to do and what not to do while waiting for the vet to arrive. We will also talk about basic life-saving techniques you can employ while you await veterinary care in a true emergency. We will then reconvene on a farm to work with a herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats to learn technical skills.

Keep an eye out for future cattle workshops coming soon!

https://www.sheeprockvet.com/goshen-ct-workshops

30/12/2025

An ugly emergency story from the dead of winter. Details tweaked for privacy. I don’t often share content from specific cases, however, I’ve been itching to share some field stories for the lessons that could be useful to an audience larger than me, the client, and the wall. The lesson here is that these huge traumatic wounds require months of after care and additional procedures. These wounds are big investments and require a lot of labor from the owner. In this case, her dedication during aftercare is what clinched the W.

“Poor young Diesel [name changed] and his leg. He had gotten slammed into the fence. My dog tried to break up a fight and grabbed young Diesel’s leg and tried to pull him through the fence. It only took a few seconds. The skin was sliced into big flaps and he looked half dead. I probably would have put him down without you. I couldn’t consider referral. You gave me the risks and I was willing to take them. Farm vets are so scarce, I am so thankful you were willing to try it. You warned me that we might not be able to save the leg at all, but he has turned into a fantastic breeder and he is a spitfire always holding his own with the big boys. It has never caused him any discomfort as far as I can tell. I remember you had to put tendons and muscles back together and did some grafting.”

It’s true that I really got to stretch my legs with this case. There was the initial surgery under general anesthesia, two sedated recheck procedures and many bandage changes. The large breed dog had gripped the leg at the stifle joint, completely lacerating the lateral and long digital extensor muscles, which turn into tendons further down. The broader muscle sheet above them was serrated, but the joint was intact and no major vessels were damaged. I got to use a pulley suture pattern for the tendon repairs which was so fun. I repaired muscle belly and debrided anything that was too compromised. We did a little bit of everything for healing - hydropulsion, drains, autologous serum, etc. It’s something you follow for a very long time before you tentatively think of it as a “success.”

14/12/2025

I love the opportunity to do a necropsy. It brings me back to when I first began learning organs, systems, structure, function, physics - the foundations of medicine. It lights me on fire all over again, and I get to share that with whoever is there. During a recent necropsy workshop on a lamb, we opened the chest to find this heart. We transected the heart base and saw that the walls of the left ventricular were about six times the width as the right ventricular walls. That’s left ventricular hypertrophy! The normal ratio should be 3:1. Remember: the left side of the heart receives oxygenated blood from the lungs, and pumps it out the whole body. The body returns deoxygenated blood to the right side of the heart, which sends it to the lungs to get re-oxygenated. You know the thing where you make a loose fist at the surface of the water, then clench it real fast to shoot water? Imagine if you start with a fist that is tightly clenched instead of loosely clenched. You can’t fill your hand with the full volume of water, and you can’t snap it shut as dramatically, so it’s a weaker jet. That’s what happens in ventricular hypertrophy. The muscular walls get beefier as the amount of room inside the chamber gets smaller, leaving less room to fill with blood. The pumps get weaker, vital organs begin to suffer, and eventually the heart begins to fail. This is usually when someone says “why does that happen?” Well, that’s what makes medicine a riddle. Point A rarely leads right to Point B in one direction, like an arrow. You have to turn your thinking inside out and sideways for the full picture. There could be multiple causes of this condition, or this condition could be the cause of something else. There could be a completely unrelated cluster of problems. In the case of this lamb, we did find other gross abnormalities that are significant. We now have enough information to figure out why this lamb was struggling, what it means for the herd, and where to start with fixing the issue. Before that, he was just a question mark.

14/11/2025

This time of year, I always like to issue a reminder to crack down on your rodent control plan and your winter water plan! Rodent activity significantly increases this time of year, and rodents can be a major source of disease introduction for small and large ruminants. Make sure you have enough bait stations and that they are in strategic spots, and remember to refresh the bait regularly. Vacc out your feed room and your hay area before you stock up for winter, making sure to check cracks and crevices for perpetually damp or moldy feed. Patch up hardware cloth and ensure your feed storage containers are water tight and nibble proof. For water management, make sure your heated water buckets or your trough heaters are working right and in good repair BEFORE you really start counting on them. Remember that as your ruminants switch over from fresh pasture to a higher hay ration, their drive to intake water increases and that must be met with a similarly increased volume of fresh water from you. Any small reduction in access to water that isn’t frozen or clean can result in a significant increase in cases of urinary calculi, decreased milk production, mineral toxicities, and even toxic ingestions or waterborne infections like leptospirosis as they search for alternative drinking sources.

29/10/2025

It has been an incredible first year serving clients in my own community again. Wild horses couldn’t drag me from being there for you all. Happy anniversary to us! You have all supported me and my practice, and in turn I will always try to support you right back in anything that I do. As many of you know, food assistance programs are near and dear to my family. In the coming months, there is an opportunity to pay back my small farmer clients, and use that to make an impact on local food insecurity. Take a look at your shelves and freezers and let me know what you’d like to move and my team will organize the rest.

18/09/2025

Something I have relied on really heavily in the last year or so is mammary gland and teat imaging via ultrasound. I’ve found it to be a great source of information, especially when I’ve got the milk tests (SCCs or cultures, ideally both!) in hand. Ultrasounding the udder going into the dry period has been especially helpful when the dairy farmer is planning for the next lactation cycle, weighing their options and coming to a decision point. Yes, palpation is great, but with live imaging I can differentiate between an angry lymph node, a soft tissue mass, or an abscess. Some abscesses will be harboring sneaky contagious bacteria that aren’t necessarily showing up on your SCCs or cultures, but come next lactation cycle will cause a headache. I can also see duct dilation, fibrotic (chronically scarred) ducts or teat cisterns, little inflamed nodules around the annular ring that may result in major milk flow issues, and so on. This is something we were able to practice in real time when dairy farmer, ag educator, and veterinary technician Kristie Laverdiere brought her Alpine Goat, Ginny, to Lakeview High School’s Veterinary Science class. Kristie is the owner/operator of Lavender Hills Farm in Canaan, and during a milking session recently, she discovered palpable, irritating lumps in Ginny’s udder. Her milk tests were negative for mastitis, but her overall production was diminishing. Melissa and I agreed to meet Kristie and Ginny in the Vet Sci classroom at Lakeview to work up the case with the students. We lead them through a brief thought exercise as a fun way to introduce basic ultrasound concepts and basic mammary health concepts, then Ginny kindly let us ultrasound her right in the room. We came up with an answer and some ways to increase her comfort level. I don’t want to share Ginny’s private information, but I’ll say this is a temporary issue and easily manageable. Ginny pooped on the floor, ate a napkin off the desk, and got some scratches from everyone.

05/09/2025

Been sitting on this one for a while now, mostly because it’s hard to figure out how to introduce someone with so much impact. Some of my clients have already worked with Melissa on a farm call, but many of you will already know her from the agricultural community or the veterinary field. Melissa’s very first job was on a dairy farm in Massachusetts, where she milked the cows and tended to the calves, before eventually moving on to manage an equine facility. Once settled in Connecticut, she became a first generation farmer. This year will be her fifteenth year operating the Winter Winds Farm right here in Litchfield. The Finn family runs a cow/calf program and a pig program, they make hay and maple syrup, and grow row crops and sweet corn. All the while, Melissa built a career as a veterinary technician, accruing an impressive 21 years overall of technical experience, 19 of which were dedicated to the large animal medicine and surgery niche. I may have bribed her with chocolate milk, but either way, you’ll be seeing a lot more of her. Melissa is now part of my team, which most importantly makes her part of your team. Many of you will have already benefited from having her as a neighboring farmer or a technician, so you’ll know just how much we all stand to gain. I hope you’re all as excited to welcome Melissa as I am!

Tuesday	09:00 - 12:00
Friday	09:00 - 12:00
Saturday	09:00 - 12:00

Sheep Rock, LLC: Veterinary Consulting

18/03/2026

06/03/2026

25/02/2026

16/02/2026

20/01/2026

14/01/2026

30/12/2025

14/12/2025

14/11/2025

29/10/2025

18/09/2025

05/09/2025

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