Episode 185
For the Love of Goats
Before you buy a goat, there’s one important question you may not have thought to ask: How does the seller manage internal parasites?
When you purchase a goat, you could be bringing home more than just a new addition to your herd. You might also be introducing dewormer-resistant worms that could create serious health problems for your goats for years to come.
In this episode of Goat Notes, we’re talking about why a breeder’s deworming practices matter and what you should ask before purchasing goats. We’ll cover the red flags to watch for, why routine deworming can contribute to drug resistance, and why a goat that’s recently been dewormed isn’t necessarily a safer purchase.
Whether you’re buying your first goats or adding to an established herd, understanding the seller’s parasite-management practices is an important part of protecting your goats’ health.
Related episodes
- Parasite Resistance, Resilience, and Dewormer Resistance
- Dewormer Resistance: A Goat Owner’s Experience
- Goat Worms: Myths and Misunderstandings
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Transcript
Deborah Niemann 00:00
When you buy a goat, you’re not just buying the goat. You may also be bringing home the consequences of the seller’s parasite management practices.
00:08
Welcome to Goat Notes, the shorter episodes of For the Love of Goats, where we tackle one important topic to help you raise happier, healthier goats.
00:18
Today, we are talking about something most people never think to ask when buying goats, how does the seller manage internal parasites? You might ask about disease testing, vaccinations, and feeding practices, but what about deworming? Does the breeder deworm every goat on a regular schedule? Are they using the correct dosage? Do they only treat goats that actually need it? And do they even know whether the dewormers they’re using still work?
00:44
The answers to these questions matter because you could be bringing home more than a new goat. You could also be introducing dewormer resistant parasites to your pasture, creating a problem that may affect your herd for years to come.
01:00
So today we’re going to talk about what you should ask a seller about their parasite management practices before you bring a new goat home.
01:09
Picture this: you find the perfect goat. She’s beautiful, healthy looking, comes from a reputable breeder, and has everything you want. You ask about CAE testing, vaccinations, and her diet. But you forget one important question: How does this farm manage internal parasites? That was a question that was nowhere on my radar when I first got started with goats.
01:33
And in fact, in 2003, I purchased a baby goat that had everything I wanted. He was going to be my new herd sire. He was beautiful, black and white spots. He had blue eyes. He had a mom with the most amazing udder and fantastic milk production. Everything about her was just great. And then within a couple of weeks, he was not looking so good. So I took a fecal to my vet, and she said he has worms. So I needed to give him a dewormer. I had never needed to give any of my goats a dewormer on my farm at all in the first two years I had had them.
02:08
And she said to buy Safeguard at the store, so I did. I gave it to him, and a few days later he was down and could not get up. And I rushed him two hours to the University of Illinois Vet Hospital. He died within about half an hour of arrival. They did a necropsy and said that he died from worms, barber pole worms, to be specific. It’s the first time I’d ever heard that name.
02:32
And when I called the person who sold him to me and said what had happened and told her that I had given him Safeguard, she kind of yelled at me and said, “Everybody knows Safeguard doesn’t work. Why did you do that?” Well, I didn’t know that, and that’s actually not true.
02:50
Dewormer resistance varies from one farm to another because it’s all about what they use on that farm. I had never used a dewormer on my farm, so none of my goats had been exposed to it. However, the farm he came from had used it so much, and probably at the incorrect dosage, that their goats were carrying worms that were resistant to Safeguard.
03:12
So, giving him safeguard didn’t do any good. The seller’s deworming practices matter a lot, and you don’t have to learn this the hard way, like I did. Dewormer resistance is inherited by the worms, not the goats. So it’s all about the worms that the goat is carrying inside of their body. And that little buckling that I bought was carrying worms from his original farm that were resistant to the safeguard that I used.
03:37
Overusing dewormers, as well as using expired dewormers, using dewormers at the wrong dosage, and things like that create dewormer resistant worms. We’ve got a whole episode on that that I’ll mention a little bit later. Treating every goat on a schedule, regardless of need, can accelerate this resistance. Or overdiagnosing worm problems can also lead to overusing dewormers. Under dosing and inappropriate treatment protocols can also contribute.
04:05
Resistant worms can travel to a new farm inside an apparently healthy goat, just like my little buckling brought worms that were resistant to my farm, and it actually had devastating effects because this was 2003. When he died at the vet hospital, they told me to start deworming all of my bucks monthly with Ivermectin, and so I did. And just a few months later, two more bucks died from worms, and now I had not only Safeguard resistance but also Ivermectin resistance.
04:39
It’s really important here to note that there is a difference between buying a goat that has worms and buying one that is carrying worms that are difficult or impossible to kill. All goats that are grazing have worms, and that’s not a problem. The problem happens when they have more worms in their body than their immune system can handle. What’s really important, though, is whether the worms in the goat’s body are resistant to dewormers. That is what is going to cause you a really big problem if you bring home one of those goats.
05:12
So there are five questions that you need to ask before buying goats.
05:16
Question one: How often do you deworm your goats? This is probably the most important question that you ask your seller. If they tell you that they deworm their goats every month or even every three months, that is not a place that you want to get your goats from. Even every six months can be a problem because basically every time the worms on that farm get exposed to that dewormer, you’re going to have more and more resistance. Every time they use that dewormer, there will be more survivors, meaning that the proportion of worms on the pasture is going to get higher and higher in terms of which ones are resistant to that dewormer.
05:55
Question two: How do you decide which goats need deworming? You definitely want to hear an answer that talks about only deworming goats that actually need it. You want to hear them talk about things like checking the FAMACHA score, the five point check, and other clinical signs. You definitely don’t want to hear them say that they’re deworming on a schedule or deworming every doe after kidding or something like that.
06:19
A couple of years ago, we had a Goats 365 member who was a little bit panicked after bringing home a doe and her two kids. He contacted me and said, “I think I’m in trouble.” He had asked all the right questions, or almost all the right questions, before he bought the goats. He had asked, “How do you deworm?” And the person said, “Oh, we only deworm goats if they need it.” So I checked their FAMACHA score because if you use dewormers too much, you can wind up with dewormer resistance. So it sounded like this person totally knew exactly what she was talking about.
06:55
However, when he picked her up, the lady gave him the goat’s health records, which showed that this goat had been given a dewormer every single month of the past year, except for January. That was it. So every single month, the woman thought that this goat was anemic. And this is another topic, but I’m going to mention it anyway. She would give the goat the dewormer, and then she would also give it Red Cell, which she said cured the anemia. The goat was obviously not anemic. The woman was obviously not reading the eyes correctly. She was thinking it was too light, and then thinking it was dark enough.
07:35
The reality is the goat didn’t have a worm problem, and so that’s what I told the person when he contacted me, is that if this goat actually did have a worm problem, then she would be dead by now. Like there’s no way that using the same dewormer 11 of the last 12 months would help a goat that had worms. So that’s the good news. The bad news is you know which dewormer is not going to work if she ever does have a worm problem.
08:00
Question number three: Which dewormers do you use, and at what dosage? Unfortunately, a lot of people use the dosage that is on the bottle, and sometimes they even use that dosage because their vet told them to.
08:14
The dosage on the bottle is wrong for every single dewormer out there, even the ones that say they are for goats. Safeguard and Valbasin both have a goat dosage on there, but in both cases those are incorrect. And more current research has shown that they actually need twice that much. So if somebody is using those dosages that are on the bottle, then they’re going to have a lot of worms survive, and those worms are going to be resistant, so even if you do use the correct dosage, a lot of the worms are going to survive.
08:45
And unfortunately, with Ivermectin and Cydectin, those people see that they’re labeled for sheep and cattle, and so they will either use the sheep or cattle dosage. And again, the goat actually needs twice the sheep dosage. It’s also important that people not tell you that they are rotating dewormers every time because rotating dewormers just accelerates dewormer resistance to all of the dewormers much more quickly.
09:12
And then question number four: This is the question that would have helped that Goats 365 member if he had asked ahead of time. When was this particular goat last dewormed, and with what, and at what dosage? If somebody tells you that a goat has been dewormed a lot, that’s a bad sign. Honestly, things can get a little tricky when you start looking at this because sometimes you might have to ask yourself, well, what’s more important-the genetics that this goat is going to bring into my herd, or the fact that they might be carrying dewormer resistant worms.
09:46
And then you also need to think about quarantine. And this is the kind of thing that we talk about in Goats 365 in our meetings on Zoom because it does get tricky. It’s not all as simple as, you know, yes or no.
10:02
And finally, question number five: Have you had problems with dewormer resistance or goats dying from worms on your farm? A seller who acknowledges past problems and explains what they’ve changed may be more trustworthy than someone who simply claims never to have had a worm problem. The important thing is that if they did have a worm problem, they have learned from it, and they’re now doing things differently.
10:25
For example, 20 years ago, we had goats dying from worms, and we learned a lot from that. And today, less than 10% of our goats get a dewormer every year, and we don’t have goats dying from worms anymore. In fact, the goats born on our farm are naturally resistant and resilient, and don’t have any worm problems.
10:43
Now let’s talk a little bit about what to do when you bring your goats home. This is incredibly important, and it absolutely needs to involve quarantining the new goats for many reasons, not just parasites. Although a lot of people do realize that it’s important to quarantine because of the possibility of disease, but they don’t realize that quarantine because of parasites could be equally or even more important.
11:08
In fact, if I had quarantined that little buckling that I purchased instead of putting him right out there with my other bucks, I probably wouldn’t have had two more bucks die a few months later. Your absolute minimum quarantine period should be a month, six weeks, or two months is even better. And because goats don’t like to be alone, you need to either buy two from one farm at the same time or have a wether that is your quarantine buddy. Because the wetherhas a lower financial value than your bucks and other breeding animals.
11:44
During the quarantine period is when you are going to do things like keep an eye on the goat to see what the FAMACHA score is like, what the five point check is like, and then make a decision about deworming. And again, that gets kind of complicated. I know there’s stuff out there that says that when you bring a new goat on the farm to triple deworm them the day they arrive, and that is one strategy. However, since I don’t need to use dewormers personally on my farm very much at all, I don’t usually have more than one dewormer available because I only need to use it two or three times a year.
12:17
So it would be financially a lot to go out and buy three different classes of dewormers just for one or two goats. However, I am also quite brutal about quarantining. We have not purchased any new does since 2005, and every few years I buy a couple of new bucks, and they stay in quarantine usually for four to six months.
12:41
So they’re not going to poop any worm eggs onto my pasture for many, many months after their arrival. I want to mention that simply deworming every new goat and sticking them out on the pasture is not a reliable biosecurity plan. Even if you do triple deworm, you definitely should not put them out on the pasture because every worm that survives a triple deworming is going to be pooping out eggs that are from worms that are resistant to all three dewormers.
13:08
So they are the strongest of the strong, and I would want those goats in quarantine for quite a long time. And if any of those goats already came with any kind of dewormer resistance, you really want them pooping those eggs out inside your barn, where they’re going to wind up in a compost pile somewhere far away from your pastures.
13:30
Also, getting a fecal test that has a very low number of worms is not the same thing as getting the all clear to put that goat out on pasture. So again, there just is no excuse for not quarantining a new goat when they come onto your farm. Some people think that it’s great if the seller says that they are going to deworm the goat before you purchase them, but they’re not necessarily a safer purchase.
13:51
Again, you got to ask the seller what have they been using. So if they’re using nothing but Safeguard and Ivermectin and they’re deworming half of their herd with that two or three times a year, and that’s what they give to the goat that they’re selling you. They’re probably going to have a pretty big survival rate. So hearing the sellers say that they’re going to deworm for you before the sale doesn’t really help you much, unless you’ve asked all those questions and you know that they’re deworming less than 10% of their herd annually.
14:19
If a goat was recently treated with an ineffective dewormer, the surviving worms will be resistant to that dewormer. And just to be clear, I want to distinguish between a breeder who has an occasional goat that needs treatment and one who is using dewormers a lot.
14:33
The goal that the American Consortium for Small Ruminant Practitioners has is that less than 10% of your goats will need a dewormer every year, and that’s where my herd is at. So it is absolutely attainable. So if someone does have a few goats that they are deworming every year, again less than 10% of their herd, that suggests someone who is doing a good job with parasite management. Whereas if somebody is giving a dewormer to half of their herd or more on a regular basis, that’s bad news for the long term.
15:07
So before you ask whether a goat has been dewormed, be sure to ask why it was dewormed, how often the farm deworms, what dosages they use, and whether the dewormers are still working.
15:18
Your whole herd is counting on you here by purchasing goats from a farm with thoughtful parasite management, you can protect the long-term health of all the goats that are already on your farm.
15:29
If you’d like more information, we’ve got lots of other episodes, including episode number 179 – Parasite Resistance, Resilience, and Dewormer Resistance.
15:39
Episode 153 – Dewormer Resistance: A Goat Owner’s Experience, where Tammy Gallagher talks about her experience with devastating resistant parasites, and then episode number 114, Goat Worms: Myths and Misunderstandings, with Dr. Michael Pesato, which talks about why routinely deworming healthy goats is not a good idea.
16:01
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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