20/08/2026
Let's talk entropion.
For those who aren't familiar, entropion is when the (usually bottom) eyelid rolls inward and the eyelashes rub on the eyeball, causing irritation. If not fixed it can lead to ulceration, blindness, and even loss of the eye.
Entropion can be congenital and this is moderately heritable. It's a complex polygenic trait that isn't a simple dominant or recessive situation, but it is a known thing in romneys. It can also appear after difficult births and in lambs that get dehydrated.
When we started our flock we had no way of knowing if our foundation ewes carried this trait because it's extremely rare in adult sheep, being relatively straightforward to fix. Several of our foundation ewes produced lambs with entropion and the first couple of years were a bit of a nightmare as every lamb had to be checked at birth and any with entropion would need to be fixed straight away.
Fixing involves manually turning the eyelid to the correct position, repeatedly, as many times as it takes till it stays there by itself. In our first few lambings, some of these fixes involved 2-3 days of doing this. As you probably know, lambs get stronger and faster in those first few days and an entropion eye does not slow them down, so for us any lamb with persistent entropion after 24 hours comes into a small paddock so we can catch the little bu**er easily and we do it every hour till it's sorted.
Other options include injecting a bleb of antibiotic or saline into the lower lid which holds the lid in position until it 'sets' like that. This is generally a vet job. There are also suture clips that can be used, there's a technique using a halter arrangement made from a rubber band which is apparently quite good (we've never tried it), or in really persistent cases, it can be stitched.
However, we've only ever needed to use the bleb technique a couple of times, and for the most part manual turning has worked for us.
But, because it's a royal pain in the arse and horrible for the sheep, we have also religiously culled anyone who was born with entropion. As a result, this year we are nearly finished lambing and only just had our first case.
This little dude was born yesterday but the entropion wasn't spotted till this morning. Sometimes the swelling from having it for 24 hours can make it harder to fix, so after turning it out this morning we checked again just now. Luckily for us, we can see the edge of his bottom eyelid all the way from the back to the front, which shows it isn't rolled in anywhere. There is still some swelling which obscures it in the pic, but you can see his eye is no longer watering and it looks like he's going to be ok.
He obviously won't be a breeding ram though, despite being from two registered parents. We simply will not sell an animal that's likely to introduce this kind of problem into someone's flock. It's a shame that some people still will, and we recommend asking about this when buying breeding stock because dealing with multiple cases of entropion a year SUUUUUUCKS.
