Anemia in Goats

Episode 140
For the Love of Goats

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Goat owners should be well-versed in the art of the FAMACHA check. We know that bright red mucous membranes of the eyes are a good sign while pale or white mucous membranes could indicate a heavy parasite load and anemia. But if your goat is anemic, outside of administering a dewormer, should you offer additional treatment? Did you know that your goat may also be anemic from causes other than a heavy parasite load?

In this episode, we are joined again by Dr. Robert Van Saun, professor of veterinary science at Pennsylvania State University and a specialist in ruminant nutrition. Dr. Van Saun covers various other ailments that could lead to anemia in your goat. He also discusses those oral iron supplements and the science behind whether or not they are actually effective in treating an anemic animal. Plus, should you be worried about anemia if your goat eats kale?

Related podcast episodes/articles:

If you’re dealing with a severely anemic goat, a blood transfusion might be a life-saving option. Learn more in our episode on Blood Transfusion in Goats.

Severe blood loss can result in life-threatening anemia. Find out more about this in Uterine Rupture and Hemorrhage in Goats.

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Transcript – Anemia in Goats

Introduction 0:02
For the love of goats. We are talking about everything goat. Whether you’re a goat owner, a breeder, or just a fan of these wonderful creatures, we’ve got you covered. And now, here’s Deborah Niemann.

Deborah Niemann 00:17
Hello everyone, and welcome to today’s episode. This is going to be really helpful for pretty much everybody who has goats, because at some point you have a goat that’s anemic, usually because of worms, but possibly because of something else. And so since this is a nutrition topic, we are joined today, again, by Dr. Robert Van Saun. If you listened to any of the nutrition topics on the podcast before you know who Dr. Van Saun is. He’s a vet professor from Penn State University. He’s a ruminant nutritionist. And we are excited to have you back again on the show today, Dr Van Saun. Welcome!

Dr. Van Saun 00:52
Thank you. Good to be back again.

Deborah Niemann 00:55
So the first thing is that most of the time, if somebody has an anemic goat–which they probably know because they’ve done a FAMACHA check–they pull down the lower eyelid and it looks very pale, or hopefully not, but if it’s white, that is definitely a sign of extremely severe anemia. And usually that is a result of barber pole worm, because it’s a blood sucker, and so it can literally cause a goat to bleed to death. And the first thing then, of course, that most people would do is treat for worms, but a lot of people want to go beyond that and provide some type of an iron supplement, which I have never done. I’ve never had a vet tell me to do that, and I don’t feel like it’s been detrimental, because either the goat recovered, even if it took them a week or two, or they died so quickly after the deworming that I know really the only thing that would have saved them was a blood transfusion. Do you recommend any kind of treatment for anemia after someone’s treated a goat for worms?

Dr. Van Saun 01:59
Again, Deborah, generally not because the body is very good at maintaining iron stores and, at least in the liver analyses that I’ve done over the years, we’ve shown that liver iron stores are, are quite high, or generally quite high. I rarely have run into a case of iron deficiency in looking at liver. Now, of course, we know that our red blood cells all come from the bone marrow, and so it’s the bone marrow that has to grow the cell and incorporate iron into the protein hemoglobin, to make it, you know, a normal red blood cell. The challenge we have is iron is stored in one form, but it has to be incorporated into a different form when it goes into the hemoglobin or myoglobin proteins, whether this is being made for red blood cells or myoglobin is sort of the oxygen carrying protein in our muscles. And the thing that’s important here is it is ceruloplasmin, which is a copper containing protein made in the liver that converts the storage iron into the active form. And so what I’ve seen, in many cases, is more of a copper deficiency leading to the anemia. And so I’d be more cautious about just inadvertently or adding iron, and I’d start to look at some of these other issues, especially with many of our previous conversations about copper status and molybdenum and sulfur and all of those things that could be in there. So I think that’s one. And I just had a case about two weeks ago, I visited a sheep farm, and they were having parasite problems in this one group of animals, and this one animal that we euthanized and had evaluated for necropsy, when I evaluated her, when she was barely alive, I mean, she had the whitest gums and the whitest eyelids that I’ve ever seen. I mean, just white, white, white. But yet her liver iron was quite good, but she was copper deficient, and so again, feeding extra iron, because the body holds on to iron so tightly. And the other thing, if we have a lot of gut damage due to the parasites, there’s the potential for secondary bacterial invasion, and those bacteria require iron. So if you add iron into the gut, by feeding iron or whatever, you can actually promote gram-negative bugs to grow.

Deborah Niemann 04:59
Wow, that’s really good to know. And I think if you’re giving it orally, you’re, you’re really feeding those bugs in the gut.

Dr. Van Saun 05:08
That’s, that’s right. That’s direct right there.

Deborah Niemann 05:11
Wow, that is really good to know. Um, so what–so then if people are listening and go, oh, so that means I should give my goats copper after treating for worms. What do you think about that?

Dr. Van Saun 05:22
Well, no, I wouldn’t do that either, just because you know, we know potentially the risks of copper and copper toxicosis, and so this is one of those challenges that I think we have to put a little more faith in, in the animal being able to recover, assuming that the animal is in fairly decent shape. You know, I mean, if an animal’s on a poor quality diet and the protein is limited, doesn’t matter how much iron you provide them, they’re not going to have the amino acids to make the proteins to turn the red blood cells over, right? So red blood cells have a lifespan of approximately 105 days in the blood, and so they’re constantly turning over. And so if you have a parasitic infection that’s taking red blood cells away more quickly than they normally would be lost. Plus, of course, it’s taking proteins out of the blood, right? You know, it’s consuming the blood. There’s other factors, you know. I think energy, protein, you know, considering copper, there’s, there’s other things to be thinking about. Another important one is, is making sure we do have adequate cobalt and vitamin B12. I mean, if I was going to do anything, I might be thinking about doing vitamin B12 injections or something like that.

Deborah Niemann 06:44
Okay, I’m glad you mentioned protein, because I know I always tell people that when they’ve got a goat that’s severely parasitized, it usually also means their body condition is going to be really poor, and it’s really important to increase the protein in that goat’s diet, to rebuild the muscle in there. But it sounds like it’s the protein–the higher protein diet is important for more than just rebuilding the muscle mass of the animal.

Dr. Van Saun 07:07
Yeah, well, it’s, I mean, amino acids play so many different roles in the body and in any infectious disease process, whether it’s parasites or bacteria or viruses, the body responds in kind of a unique way. When these immune cells get activated, they secrete various proteins, peptides and other compounds to sound the alarm to the body about, you know, we’re being invaded; we need to build up our defenses. And one of the more important cytokines that is released is what we call interleukin-1. And one of the physiologic responses of interleukin-1 is to hide iron, because, again, as I said earlier, gram-negative bacteria absolutely require iron for their metabolism. And so if you start to give iron, you’re, you’re counteracting a normal, physiologic defensive response. And so, you know, again, you know if, if, if an animal is evaluated and their packed cell volume is, is critically low, then just adding iron isn’t going to do it. You, you probably are going to need to go to some kind of transfusion therapy or something along those lines. But again, I’m just, I’m cautious about just over, just kind of knee jerk responses of adding iron or adding copper or or zinc, or whatever you want to do. I would titrate that with what the status of the situation is. And so like I said earlier, with that sheep flock I’m working on, we’ve, we have documented copper deficiency, and we know that the iron is more than adequate in the diet. And so we’re working very carefully to try and augment and improve that status.

Deborah Niemann 09:08
Yeah, and one of the things I want to mention too to our listeners is that we contacted–there are two companies that sell oral iron supplements that we hear people using the most–we contacted both of those companies and asked them to show us the research for those products to, so that we could see, you know, like, what was the dosage? What’s the dosage needed, and how does it increase the iron and everything? And both of them refused to send us any research. One said they don’t share any research that’s not legally required, which is basically zero so, and then the other just flat out refused and said that they just don’t share that. And I haven’t seen any independent research that shows that any of these oral iron supplements are helpful. And so when people say, like, Oh well, I give my, give this to my goats for like two weeks or whatever, and they get better. Well, I’ve had goats for 22 years and haven’t given any oral iron supplements, and they get better too. So just because you’re giving them the iron and they get better doesn’t mean that they needed it. And I think it’s really fascinating that you could actually be hurting the animal by giving them that iron because you’re feeding the gut bacteria. So the next thing I want to talk about, you briefly mentioned blood transfusions and a low PCV, and that’s something that I think most people are not aware is even possible. I have a goat that had a blood transfusion years ago. She was my absolute best milker of all time, and so, which is why it was like, you know, we were very concerned about her, and took her to the university because she was completely, completely white eyelids, and they did a blood transfusion. Can you talk a little bit about when to know that you should have a blood transfusion and how that process works?

Dr. Van Saun 10:55
Well, again, that’s going to depend some on just the, maybe, nutritional history of the animal. Has she been on a good diet, or has she been on kind of a poor diet and already debilitated? A blood transfusion is going to be the quickest way to get more oxygen into the system and, and kind of recover that process. Transfusions don’t come without some risk, you know, I mean, there’s always the potential for an immune reaction to the red blood cells, although in our ruminant animals, that’s not as big of a problem as it is like in humans. You know, when humans, we have to check for the Rh factor, and whether your, your antibody, or if you’re AB or A or, you know, those kind of things. It’s, it’s not as big of a deal there. I think, just taking a blood sample, looking at the protein status, so the albumin concentration, if that’s too low, like if it’s below 1.5–or so–mg/dL, then that that animal is going to need some kind of colloid or or something to try and keep the fluid in the blood vessels. Otherwise, she’s going to become extremely anemic and lose fluid into her tissues, you know. So that’s why we see the bottle jaw and, and, you know, things, things of that nature. Again, depending on the age of the animal, if she is, let’s say, pregnant, or if she’s lactating, you know, depending on the nutritional needs of that animal, decisions might be made if they’re below, you know, a PV–a packed cell volume–of 10% or something that, you know, they, they really need to have something done.

Deborah Niemann 12:48
Yeah, with my doe, it was that she had just given birth within the last couple days, so the assumption was that she had had some kind of internal bleeding as a result of that. Which I think most people don’t think about that with their pregnant does, because we’re, we’re vertical. If we bleed a lot after a baby, it all comes out. But goats are horizontal. Um, so if our goats are bleeding, gravity is not pushing it out of their body. It’s, it’s staying in their belly. So you can’t assume that your goat’s not bleeding if you don’t see blood.

Dr. Van Saun 13:26
Right, right. No, you’re absolutely right there. And, and, and certainly there’s, there is all the possibilities of, you know, a rupture of a uterine artery, although that would be pretty devastating. But, you know, you, you can have tears in the uterine wall or something like that, that could bleed for quite some time before it finally clots and, and the bleeding ultimately stops, and that animal is going to show to be fairly quickly anemic.

Deborah Niemann 13:57
Yeah, exactly. So one of the things too a lot of people wonder about is, like the blood types, and you mentioned that there’s not much risk of a reaction to a blood transfusion.

Dr. Van Saun 14:08
In our, in our ruminant species. In the ruminant species, right? You know, other species, we have more challenges there. Horses are another one that’s kind of problematic. You know, when we do a blood transfusion for foals, we have to be pretty cautious and do some blood typing. But in ruminants, we can usually get away with at least one, if not two, before we really see any problems.

Deborah Niemann 14:36
Right. The–another thing that we touched on a little bit was copper, and when I was looking at Goat Medicine to prepare for our interview today, I noticed that copper toxicity can cause anemia. So let’s get into some of these other possible causes of anemia. How would you know that, that the problem is copper toxicity or one of these other things?

Dr. Van Saun 15:00
Yeah, so in our initial discussion about this topic, I was a little concerned about the scope of it, because certainly, anemia is a very, I’ll just call it “diverse disease.” There’s many things. I mean, the obvious cause of anemia is blood loss. All right, so that’s, you know, hemorrhage, you know, severe hemorrhage, you know, is the number one cause of anemia, or some kind of ongoing blood loss things. Then we look at, is there something wrong within the bone marrow, like leukemias or things like that, that could affect the stem cells from making red blood cells, and then over time, you’re going to lose that. There’s other elements. We, we talked about iron, and so certainly iron deficiency by itself will cause a classic anemia. Copper deficiency will cause a very similar type of anemia as, as iron, because of the reasons we talked about earlier, but we were addressing a little bit about diseases, and there’s another unique aspect. There’s anemia of chronic disease. So if an animal has ongoing disease–you know some kind of chronic disease process–they could become anemic because, as I was describing earlier, the activation of the pro-inflammatory cytokines and everything that, that the body’s trying to fight off whatever infectious agent there is, that goes on long enough the sequestering of iron actually sequesters iron away from the bone marrow and red blood cell formation. So, so there is a disease condition called anemia of chronic disorder. Now, there are diseases that cause lysis of the red blood cell which will lead to anemia. In other words, the loss of red blood cells is much faster than the replacement. And so, as a consequence, you know, anemia is just basically low red blood cell count, right? That’s why we talk about packed cell volume, or we talk about cell numbers, you know, like 8 billion red blood cells as a normal, you know, as a normal concentration, or something like that. So there’s a number of infectious diseases, anaplasmosis, babesia, in similar organisms. Some of these are tick-borne diseases, which are becoming more prevalent. They can cause lysis of the red blood cell and see anemia as, as a classic consequence. Copper toxicosis will cause lysis of the red blood cell, predominantly in sheep, not so much in goats. And that’s, that’s kind of a misnomer. And the thing is, though, is the lysis of the red blood cells is pretty devastating with copper toxicosis, so that it’s more of an acute death, rather than an animal ongoing and showing, you know, anemia. Vitamin B12 deficiency will cause anemia that’s called megaloblastic anemia, or Pernicious anemia. This is seen in humans. It’s seen in ruminant animals when they’re cobalt deficient. So because of all of this, we, we actually classify anemias based on what happens to the red blood cell. All right, so we have anemias where the red blood cells are very small. That’s called, let’s see, hypochromic microcytic. So microcytic is small red blood cells. Large red blood cells, like in megaloblastic anemia, that’s where the cells are macrocytic. They’re very large, larger than normal. So taking a blood test, we can actually look at the red cell structure. You know, they, the tools that we have, the machines that we have that perform the blood counts and everything, they can actually measure the volume of the red blood cells and if they’re really large or not. And then we can also look at whether the anemia–the red blood cells in an anemic case–have adequate hemoglobin. All right, so they’re, they’re normochromic, or they could be hypochromic, that’s usually with iron deficiency, or they can be hyperchromic, all right. So, and all of it just has to do with what they–a given toxin or nutrient has effect on whether it’s the development or production of hemoglobin or the actual development of the cell in the bone marrow itself.

Deborah Niemann 20:05
Okay, and then, so a goat with a healthy rumen produces its own B vitamins, but they need to have enough cobalt to produce B12. So those two things go hand-in-hand.

Dr. Van Saun 20:17
That’s correct.

Deborah 20:18
So how exactly does an animal then become cobalt/B12 deficient?

Dr. Van Saun 20:24
Well, the, the main reason for cobalt deficiency is low cobalt in the soils and in the plants. And so that’s, that’s a very common issue in, like, Australia, in New Zealand, some parts of the US around the Great Lakes are cobalt deficient. Parts of England are cobalt deficient. And so the National Research Council, the guidance in terms of requirements, we recommend about 0.20 parts per million, or 0.20 mg/kg of dietary dry matter as cobalt. So we can, we can supplement the diet. And if you look at your trace mineral salts, or any of your complete supplements that you have, there probably is some kind of cobalt source in there.

Deborah Niemann 21:17
Okay, would a blood test be able to tell you if an animal was cobalt deficient?

Dr Van Saun 21:20
Yes. We, we now, with the newer technologies that we are using to measure mineral concentrations in blood with the–what’s called the ICP mass spectroscopy–we now have been able to measure cobalt in serum, and so we’re starting to establish some good numbers for reference. Some labs will actually measure vitamin B12, or another thing that they could do is there’s a byproduct of metabolism when B12 is missing, a compound called methylmalonate increases and it’s excreted in the urine. And so they could actually take urine samples and look for elevated concentrations of methylmalonate.

Deborah Niemann 22:15
Oh, that’s interesting. Okay, and then another possible source of anemia that I found fascinating was kale. So I know a lot of people love to feed excess garden produce to their goats, and you know, I always just say, don’t give them too much of anything. But so how much kale is too much? And like, would you have to feed that to your goats daily, or–?

Dr. Van Saun 22:42
Yeah, you would have to feed an awful lot of that. I–I’d have to go back. There, there should be in most of the toxicology books there, there be some kind of recommendation as to, you know, how many grams per day or grams per kilogram of body weight that they could consume. But that one isn’t really high on my list. So I was a little surprised when, when you mentioned kale, and I’m thinking, boy, you know, I think of the brassicas, and when I think of brassicas, I think more about goitrogens and iodine issues rather than iron issues or, or the anemia.

Deborah Niemann 23:22
Yeah, I was surprised too when I saw it, so I was kind of like, well, so if your goats bust into your garden and eat some kale, I wouldn’t freak out.

D. Van Saun 23:30
Yeah, I would–no, I wouldn’t freak out about that.

Deborah 23:33
Yeah, but I also wouldn’t be feeding it to them every day if you have an abundance of it.

Dr. Van Saun 23:37
Right, right.

Deborah 23:38
What about bracken fern?

Dr. Van Saun 23:42
Yeah, bracken fern is another one of our poisonous plants. It’s got a couple different toxic compounds. One of them is thiaminase, and it can cleave thiamin. And so there, there could be some connection there, and I’m trying to remember what the other compound is. I have to, I haven’t reviewed my poisonous plants in a bit so. But that’s, you know, that’s generally what’s, what’s happening is, there’s, you know, some kind of toxin that’s interfering with either the, the use of iron or the red blood cell formation.

Deborah Niemann 24:26
Okay, and then the other thing listed for anemia–there was a long list of diseases, most of which I’ve never even heard of, you know–I was like, oh, leptospirosis. There’s one I recognize. But most of them are, like, very multi-syllabic, and I never heard of them before. And so, you know, I always tell people, because a lot of times like, there’ll be, like, one symptom that their goat has, and they’re worried that their goat has x, you know, just fill in the blank with something. And my answer is always like, well, generally, if an animal has a problem, it has multiple symptoms. And so, and which is true of anemia and parasites, you know, like, if the goat is anemic and underweight and has bottle jaw or diarrhea or whatever, like those, those symptoms all go together to lead you to think that it’s parasites. So beyond that, like, if you’ve treated for parasites, like, when would you say maybe the anemia is due to something different?

Dr. Van Saun 25:25
Yeah, so that’s a, that’s a great question, and, and I don’t know if there’s any real, well-defined perspective on this, other than if you’ve treated the animal, and we know that the anthelmintic worked, right? That’s always the big question. And you don’t start to see some improvement in the FAMACHA score or something like that within, I would say, you know, anywhere is around four to seven days, then you gotta start thinking there’s something else going on.

Deborah Niemann 25:57
Right. Yeah, that’s, I know it’s frustrating, because there are people on Facebook who are like, Oh, it takes weeks for the body to rebuild red blood cells. And that’s not the case. Like I’ve seen goats go from white to red, like you said, in four to seven days. And I’m not–

Dr. Van Saun 26:13
And again, yeah, and again, a lot of it is due to the nutritional status. If they have the energy in their diet, they have the protein in their diet, that bone marrow, and as long as there’s no kidney disease, right? The, the kidneys secrete a hormone called erythropoietin, and that is a stimulant to the bone marrow to make red blood cells. So if you have severe kidney disease, which might explain maybe the the lepto connection, although I think lepto also can cause just lysis of the red blood cell. But if the kidney can’t secrete that, then the red blood cells aren’t being made. But when it does secrete that, it kind of accelerates the, the kicking out and so we’ll see early developed red blood cells. So we could do a blood test, and if we see a high reticulocyte count, that’s an indication that the bone marrow is very, very reactive and kicking things in, right? And so that’s, you know, that could be something that you know could be used, you know, just do a simple blood test and look at the count and the presence of reticulocytes.

Deborah Niemann 27:24
Okay, I know a lot of times people think that they just give a dewormer and it’s all going to be good, but it’s important to keep them off the wormy pasture. Like, if I have an anemic goat, they stay in the barn until their eyelids pink up, you know, so that they’re not ingesting anymore larva, or anything that’s going to replace all those worms we just killed.

Dr, Van Saun 27:46
Right, right.

Deborah 27:47
And increasing the protein in the diet, and also making sure that you don’t have a problem with resistance on your farm, that your dewormer is not–your dewormer is not expired. Like I, there’s a list of about ten things.

Dr. Van Saun 28:00
You dosed them correctly. I mean, you knew what the actual weight of the animal is and, and if you, you know, if you are treating goats, we know that goats have a higher metabolism than sheep, and so we generally increase the dosage in treating goats with our anthelmintics compared to what sheep are. And some people do and don’t do that. I mean, there’s so many potential variables there that could lead to, you know, a failure of, of treatment, and then that might be perceived as, oh, they don’t have enough iron to to make the the red blood cells. So, so, yeah, we, we really do need to think about some of these other things.

Deborah Niemann 28:40
Yeah, I know. I always tell people, I know it, this, this doesn’t sound quite right, you know, like, but seriously, I hope it’s worms, because that’s really the easiest thing to deal with when you look at the alternatives for these symptoms that your goat is having. And the last person that I told that to after months and months of thinking she was fighting a parasite problem, she finally got her goat tested for Johnes, and it came back positive.

Dr. Van Saun 29:05
Yeah, yeah. See that’s, that’s a classic example of, you know, underlying issues. And again, if those underlying issues, if that’s like an infectious disease like Johnes, you’re going to have this pro-inflammatory response, which is going to suppress the production of transferrin and and iron transporting proteins. It’s going to produce these iron sequestering proteins like lactoferrin and ferritin, and so the body’s going to try and hide that iron.

Deborah Niemann 29:38
Yeah. So we’ve got a lot of episodes on the podcast about worms and treating them and stuff. And we will put those links in the show notes, so that if you haven’t heard those, you can easily access them. Dr. Van Saun, I thank you so much for being with us today. This is going to be so helpful for people. Is there anything else people need to know about anemia before we wrap up?

Dr. Van Saun 30:00
No, just, I think that the main thing is recognize that it can be caused by many different things, and that the body does a extremely good job of maintaining iron. I mean, really, the only way the body can get rid of iron is through hemorrhage. And so I, I would caution people that just, you know, just don’t jump on adding iron. So only one scenario, one disease process, which is in baby pigs. Baby pigs are, are born, they have a slow uptake, and they have a rapid turnover of of their red blood cells after they’re born, and they have a slow regeneration process. And so we, we often have to administer injectable iron in baby pigs, but that’s the only time that I’ve ever actually used iron in a therapeutic approach.

Deborah Niemann 30:57
Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Van Saun 31:01
You’re welcome.

Deborah 31:02
And that’s it for today’s show. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to hit the “subscribe” button so that you don’t miss any episodes. To see show notes, you can always visit ForTheLoveOfGoats.com and you can follow us on Facebook at Facebook.com/LoveGoatsPodcast. See you again next time. Bye for now!

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2 thoughts on “Anemia in Goats”

    • First of all, you need to be sure that you know what is causing the anemia and that you have addressed that problem, such as correctly using a dewormer if the goat has a heavy load of barberpole worm. A 16% protein goat feed and alfalfa hay or alfalfa hay pellets is a great way to increase the protein in a goat’s diet. If it is a male goat, then you only want to feed those until they have regained their body condition because male goats should not have that much calcium or phosphorus in their diet long-term.

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