TrueTrac Sheep and Goat

Before he is ever lame, he stops reaching

You will not see a limp. What you will see is a lamb who does not reach the way he did a month ago.

It is easy to read that as him settling, or getting heavy, or just being a little dull that morning. Sometimes it is. Often it is the first thing a joint tells you, and it tells you long before anything hurts.

The hairpin turn

The blood vessels that feed the growth cartilage make a hairpin turn on their way in.

Inflammation at that turn puts pressure on the supply. You know what happens to the water when a hose kinks. That is what happens to the blood feeding the growth plate, and a growth plate that gets shorted while the animal is still building is a problem that does not show up until later.

That is the lost reach. Not a sore leg. A joint being built badly while he still looks fine.

The push is the problem

Inflammation at that turn climbs when growth climbs. It climbs with conditioning, with handling, with hauling, and it climbs when you start pushing for finish.

The work that makes him competitive is the same work that loads the joints he is judged on.

Nobody is going to stop pushing. That is the game. It means the joint side has to be handled on purpose instead of hoped about.

We built a low copper version of our own technology

Sheep cannot tolerate the copper a steer or a barrow handles without trouble. Every sheep person knows it, and it is the reason you cannot simply feed a lamb whatever is sitting on the cattle shelf.

Most companies solve that by not making a sheep product at all.

We made ours. The active in this bag is DuoPort LC, and the LC stands for Low Copper. It is the same chelated mineral technology that runs in our cattle and pig products, rebuilt for an animal that needs it delivered differently.

Chelated minerals are bonded to amino acids, so they absorb intact through the mouth and the gut lining rather than getting tied up on the way. Your animal gets the benefit of the whole scoop.

This is the first joint supplement formulated specifically for show lambs and goats. Not a cattle formula with a different label on it.

The Clean Formula

A pretty label does not mean a clean formula. What a company leaves out matters as much as what it puts in.

A lot of joint supplements in this category are built on green-lipped mussel. It carries thiaminase, an enzyme that breaks thiamin down.

In a ruminant, short thiamin means polioencephalomalacia. Everybody in the barn just calls it polio. It has nothing to do with the human disease that name brings to mind, it only got stuck with the same name.

Sheep and goats are the least forgiving animals in the barn about it. Cattle get it too, particularly on high grain. In a pig it shows up differently, as slowed gut motility, the barrow who quits doing his business and nobody can work out why.

Same enzyme. Same root cause. Different animal, different wreck.

So we leave it out. Out of the lamb and goat product, out of the cattle product, out of the pig product. We do not add thiamin to chase the problem. We just refuse to put in the ingredient that tears it down.

Built for a small ruminant, from the mineral up

Built on more than a decade of True North research into lameness in show livestock.

A customer wrote in this spring certain we had made a mistake

He was new to us. He opened his TrueTrac, looked at the scoop, and was sure we had put the wrong one in the bag. It was way too small.

We had not made a mistake. That scoop is the whole point.

Your animal only eats so much in a day, and everything in that feeder is competing for the same room. A supplement that is mostly carrier does not just cost you money, it takes up space the feed was going to occupy. So we build the other direction: nothing in the bag that is not doing a job, and a dose sized to what the animal actually needs rather than to what looks generous in your hand.

He fed it all season.

Pick by how much time you have left

The 48 ounce bag is about 150 days for one animal. That covers a whole project, from the day he comes home to the day he walks in the ring.

The 20 ounce bag is about 60 days. That is for the person who is already partway into a season and knows he is not going to use a big bag. Nothing wrong with that, and we would rather sell you the right size than the bigger one.

If you are starting one, take the 48 ounce. If you are 60 days out and just now getting to this, take the 20 ounce and start today.

Top dress daily

Right on his feed. No mixing, no separate step.

Start it early, before there is anything to see. Everything about how this works depends on it being in him before the load goes on.

Feed it every day, straight through to the show, alongside the exercise and the ration you are already managing.

On the subscription

This is a daily product for a five month job. The subscription ships it on schedule and takes 10% off. Set it up on the first order and the start date stops being something you have to remember.

Doc will make it right.

If you are not satisfied, let us know. You will not have to ship anything back.

That is the whole policy.

The craft stays yours

TrueTrac does not brace him for you and it does not work him. It does not pick him out and it does not feed him.

What it does is take one variable off the table, so the animal you bring is the one your program built.

Straight answers