Baby Thunder Concerns

I am worried about Baby Thunder. He has a large, hard lump on his side. Thunder is my very first sheep. I brought him home from the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. He was a triplet, and Hope Yankey from West Va. thought she would sell him. He was in a little cage with a ewe lamb who was going home with a little girl who won an essay competition. I picked him up and felt his racing heart pounding against my chest. I was smitten and he was mine. Thunder is a purebred Coopworth sheep, a breed from New Zealand designed by a Dr. Coop. Thunder and I have been through hither and yon together, tossed from pillar to post. The thought of losing him is more than I can take - but he is a sheep and life is hard on the farm. The bitter lessons I have learned in the last seven years of having sheep are difficult to swallow. This lump could be nothing, but then we lived in New Jersey and everyone knows what happens to living things in New Jersey. All forms of cancer from everything toxic in the air, the ground and the water. I lost two wonderful beagles from cancer, and know it happened because of the neighbors in that fancy development spraying their lawns all the time. I had moved from there when I got Thunder, but in Western New Jersey we were surrounded by farms that used pesticides all the time, and there was not a living thing in the creek that ran through our rented farm. Not a fish, a turtle, a frog, or snake. And we played in it. I hope this lump is benign. Lonnie, my aged ewe, had a terrible lump on her neck that the vet said was nothing, and she's fine. Someday I will write the "Baby Thunder Stories," and I have many of them.