Dewormer Resistance: A Goat Owner’s Experience

Episode 153
For the Love of Goats

In this insightful and eye-opening episode, host Deborah Niemann is joined by Tammy Gallagher of Shady Paddock Farm in Texas to discuss the challenges of dewormer resistance and parasite management in goats. Tammy, a certified FAMACHA instructor and Nigerian Dwarf breeder, shares her personal experience of losing goats to barber pole worms and the lessons she learned in regaining control of her herd’s health.

Tammy’s story underscores the importance of understanding parasite biology, pasture management, and responsible dewormer use. Through trial, research, and adaptation, she has successfully built a herd with strong parasite resistance and implemented effective strategies to reduce worm loads without over-reliance on dewormers.

Key Takeaways

• Dewormer resistance develops from overuse and improper use of dewormers, leading to ineffective treatments.
• Farm environment plays a significant role in parasite management—what works in one location may not be effective in another.
• A combination of selective breeding, pasture management, and strategic dewormer use can help reduce worm burdens.
• Learning how to perform fecal egg counts at home allows goat owners to identify high-risk animals and make informed deworming and culling decisions.

Lessons Learned from Tammy’s Experience

• Parasite management is not one-size-fits-all—what works for one farm may not work for another.
• Identifying and culling high-risk goats can make a significant difference in reducing parasite loads.
• Sustainable parasite control involves a mix of breeding, nutrition, and pasture improvements.
• Understanding the biology of parasites and how they spread is crucial for effective management.

Preventative Measures for Goat Owners

• Get FAMACHA Certified: Essential for monitoring anemia caused by barber pole worms.
• Avoid Blanket Deworming: Only treat goats showing clinical signs of a parasite burden to prevent resistance.
• Know Your Farm’s Unique Challenges: Soil type, pasture conditions, climate, and stocking density all impact parasite control.
• Monitor goat health closely by doing the five-point check: FAMACHA, body condition score, coat condition, poop, status, and presence or absence of bottle jaw.

Related Resources

• FAMACHA training is available in the Goats 365 membership
• Join the discussion on Facebook: Love Goats Podcast

Transcript

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 00:16
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s episode. I am real excited to be joined today by Tammy Gallagher of Shady Paddock Farm in Texas. She is also a certified FAMACHA instructor, and she raises Nigerian Dwarf goats. And, like me, she learned about parasites the hard way, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Remember, a couple weeks ago, during our fifth anniversary celebration, I said one of the things that we are going to be bringing to you more in the future are personal stories, because a lot of people learn best when they hear personal stories. It’s a lot easier to remember stories than just a bunch of scientific facts and figures. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Basically, Tammy’s experience with dewormer resistance and how they overcame that on their farm. Welcome to the show, Tammy.

Tammy 01:02
Thanks for having me.

Deborah 01:03
I’m real excited to talk about this today, because as much as we’ve tried, as much as the consortium has tried, to get the information out there on parasite management, we still see a ton of old information out there. You still see people doing all the “wrong things” (and I put that in air quotes), and they think that that’s helping them, you know, like doing dewormers on a schedule and stuff like that. And they’re like, Oh, well, I know that works, because I don’t have any parasite problems. And the reality is, if you don’t know the science behind it, you don’t really know what’s going on.

And so you see a cause and effect sometimes where it doesn’t exist. It’s simply a correlation. I’ll never forget I got that question wrong as a freshman in college. I said it was true that a correlation meant cause and effect, and it does not. So that has always been at the front of my brain, like, Well, just because you’re seeing a correlation doesn’t mean one thing caused the other. So without me babbling on anymore, go ahead and tell us like when you started raising goats and how gloriously simple it all seemed.

Tammy 02:14
So, yeah, I got my first goats in late 2017. I was up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and my property was all forest. It was completely wooded. I had no pasture area whatsoever for the goats. So I had done all of this research on husbandry, breeds. I thought I had– like for a year I had–I knew I wanted goats. I wanted to be prepared, and so I just went crazy doing research. Finally decided on Nigerian Dwarfs and got the first goats. And my plan was to really kind of let my veterinarian take care of the health management aspects.

They were basically going to be pets, and I was just really going to sort of maintain them the same way I did my dogs. That worked out fine for a while. What I was taught by my veterinarian was that each year when she came to do my health assessment, she was just going to give everybody a dewormer. That’s what I witnessed. That’s what she did. She gave everybody a dose of Valbazen. Things were fabulous. I never had a parasite issue. I didn’t have any concerns that I was having a parasite issue. No diarrhea. Everyone was nice and healthy looking. My fecals always came back really showing that there were hardly any eggs present.

So I thought that was the way things were done, and that, you know, I was just the best goat owner on the face of the earth. I had everything in check. Everything was going great. And
then we decided to move. We outgrew the property that we had, and the kids all grew up and moved out. The house was too big, the taxes were eating us alive, so we decided that we were going to find a place with a smaller house and more property so that the hobby could expand. We moved to central Texas in 2019 and by 2020 I had my first dead goat–barber pole worms.

It was quite a wake up call for me. I was ready to just quit. I felt like I had failed my goat. Of course, it was my favorite goat, Romeo. I was devastated. I felt like I had really let him down, and I didn’t really know a whole lot about worms. I hadn’t done that kind of the research, because it was something that the veterinarian was taking care of for me. So when we moved here, we are 13 acres of pasture. I took my goats out of an environment where there were no parasites, basically. You always have some, but they were in an environment where there were no parasites out prolifically spreading like they do on a pasture.

We came here and I continued to do things the same way. Just, you know, giving the Valbazen once a year. Everybody got the Valbazen, and it bit me on the rump because I didn’t know the background on how worms multiply out on your pastures, how using a dewormer–the same dewormer all the time, giving it to every single goat in the herd–I didn’t know how that was impacting me so negatively. So I started doing some research. At that time, I didn’t realize that I had a resistance to Valbazen, and I lost another goat right around kidding.

At that point, I was ready to give up. I was–I felt overwhelmed, and I was just–I was ready to give up. And I think a lot of goat owners go through that when they get hit in the face like a train, like I did. Everything was perfect, and now everything is just going south, and I can’t figure out how to get control of it.

Education was key. I just started researching, researching, researching, and then I kind of had another backfire, because I learned about dewormer resistance, and now I’m scared to use a dewormer at all. Because I’m so scared, because I know I’ve got a resistance issue with my benzimidazole class, the white dewormers, which is what I was using. And I lost another goat because I was afraid to use the dewormer. So there’s that happy medium where we need to use a dewormer when it’s necessary for a sick goat. We don’t want to overuse our dewormer. So you kind of–you have to find that happy medium on how to correctly use your drugs, your dewormers or drugs.

Once I figured that out and started learning about different management techniques, I was able to get my worm problem under control. So I had to learn a lot of different things being on a property with pasture to get the worms under control without using the dewormers. One of the main things that I had to do was figure out which goats were carrying the most worms that were impacting my pastures, the ones that were needing to be dewormed to stay alive, and those animals had to be culled from my herd. That’s how I finally got control of the situation. I was just at that point where I had to do something drastic.

Deborah 08:08
Yeah, and so for people who aren’t clear on this, when your goats were on the previous farm, they were eating browse. They were eating because it was a forest. There was no grass. And worm larva–goats poop out worm eggs, which hatch and turn into larva, which then can live on the grass for a really long time, depending on the weather, you know, depending on if it’s rainy or cool or hot or whatever. Essentially, they’re going to survive until they dehydrate, which could be, you know, weeks or months, even if it’s a very rainy time.

Tammy 08:48
I’ll add something that made my situation even worse here on the property is that people kept cattle here before and the cows were overstocked in the pastures. So the soil was very–well it was dirt, it wasn’t even soil what we had it on our pastures. So what was growing in the pastures was not thriving. It was only growing a few inches because everything was so compacted and there wasn’t really nutrients in the soil to feed the plants, to feed the weeds, the forage, so that it would grow.

So not only did they go from being in a forest where they’re eating in browse, they came onto a pasture that didn’t grow high enough so that they weren’t continuously consuming larva, because your larva are only going to be in about the first four inches of your pasture growth. My pasture growth was barely four inches all the time. It wasn’t even getting up over four inches.

So they had that impact. The other impact, the really big, significant impact, was because my goats had been raised in an environment where they weren’t really being exposed to worms, they didn’t have a fabulous immunity to the worms. They had never really had an opportunity to build an immunity for the gastrointestinal parasites. So we came here to this property with a whole bunch of monkey axes in the closet. It just was not–we were set up for failure is basically what happened when we came to this property when it came to GI parasites.

Deborah 10:46
Yeah, I hear this a lot. I get, you know, we get emails from people who say, you know, “I moved to the Carolinas or Georgia three months ago, and I’ve already lost three goats to worms. And I don’t understand this because I lived in Utah or California, you know, for 10 years and raised goats. I’ve never lost a goat to parasites, and I don’t understand because I haven’t changed anything.”

Well, that’s the problem.

Tammy 11:12
Yes, and see, and I did the same thing. I moved here, not realizing that I was leaving an environment that did not promote worm survival, coming to an environment that is. I mean, I’m in Central Texas. We’re like the barber pole central area. So I moved them into an environment that is perfect for masses of GI parasites out on pastures, and I didn’t change how I was doing things because I was ignorant. I just didn’t know. I hadn’t educated myself, and I just continued to do things the exact same way.

And it was a really big wake up call. I mean, I really had a little sense of arrogance, you know, when it came to how healthy my goats were and how good they looked. And, you know, I just was like, Yeah, I’m doing everything right. Everything’s perfect. Oh, my goodness. I had so much to learn, and I didn’t even know.

Deborah 12:26
Yeah, exactly. That reminds me that somebody sent me a link to a website for a dairy in Colorado, and they said, you know, “Well, this dairy says that they deworm their goats on a schedule with ivermectin, and they’ve been doing that since the 80s, and they don’t have any worm problems.”

And my response was, “That’s because people in Colorado really don’t have worm problems, like, unless they’re on irrigated pasture, they’re not gonna have worm problems. So they’ve just been wasting their money for, you know, 50 years, because those goats in that environment, the worms don’t have a chance. If they move those goats to Georgia, they would be dying left and right.”

There was a vet from Colorado who spoke at an ADGA conference one time, and she said that they’ve brought in goats from the southeast who were barely alive, you know, because they just could not handle the parasites. And they thrived in Colorado because the environment is just so not conducive, you know. So those goats brought in those parasites and pooped them out in Colorado, and that was the end of it.

Tammy 13:36
Yeah, you know, when you say “culled” goats, I think you know that can be a bad word in the livestock business, because people automatically think that that means you’re going to kill your animals. There are ways that you can cull animals out of your herd, if that’s what you choose to do, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the end of their life. One of the things that you can do is find a farm for them to go to where parasites don’t thrive.

Deborah 14:03
Yeah, exactly. So how did you get control of your worm problem then?

Tammy 14:09
Well, time was, you know, a big factor. Like I mentioned before, one of the biggest steps forward was breeding the genetics for parasite resistance into my herd. So I had to get–if people aren’t familiar with a 70/30 rule or an 80/20 rule–about the majority of your worms are in a small population of your herd. So 80% of your worm population on your pastures is likely coming from about 20% of the members of your herd. If you can identify that 20%, those goats, and get them off your property, you’re going to leap and bound, help yourself out. And you do that by–I did it by trending fecal egg counts.

So I learned how to do fecals at home, and I just started doing fecals like crazy. And it is an incredible amount of information that you can get when you are collecting fecals in one day on every member of your herd and running fecals. I ran fecals till I was counting them in my sleep. And I did it for months and months and months, and it was really easy to figure out who needed to go and who needed to stay. So that was the big thing that I did.

And your parasite resistance in–and I’m not talking about dewormer resistance, I’m talking about parasite resistance, so people don’t get confused about that. Parasite resistance is a good thing. So the parasite resistance is pretty heritable. It’s pretty easy to breed that into your herd. And so that’s been the thing that has made the biggest difference for me.

We improved our pastures. We spent a lot of time doing soil samples and working with our county extension, working with the folks in the agriculture department through Texas A&M and coming up with a plan to turn our dirt into soil in our pastures. We compost all of our bedding here on the farm, anything that comes out of our chicken coops, goat areas, everything gets composted. We’re always adding that out to the pastures. We’ve just added as much mass as we can, organic mass as we can, out into our pastures. We started a fertilization program so that we can get good nutrients into the soil, and so now we have pasture growth.

And the next step, of course, the Cadillac for parasite management is rotational grazing. You know, that’s a whole nother subject. It’s easy to say rotational grazing. It’s actually quite an involved concept of learning how to do that appropriately, but you have to have pasture to graze on in order to do that correctly. So that’s going to be the next thing that we’re doing.

We also implemented BioWorma into the diet of our animals here, so that really helped decrease the amount of larva that we’re hatching out onto our pastures. We started using BioWorma almost immediately after it became available here in the US, and this is the first year that we’re not using it pretty much year round, because here in Texas, unfortunately, barber pole worms are kind of a year round problem. We have a couple of months where it gets cold enough that they’re not so bad out on the pastures. But it’s a little scary that I’m not using BioWorma all the time, so I’m selectively using it now. I’m using it for my periparturient females. We know that they put a lot of worm larva out on the pasture during the end of pregnancy and into those first several weeks of lactation.

Kids, you know, they’re really bad about contaminating the pastures with worm larva. So the kids are on that. And then we use it during times, like for our bucks, when they’re in rut, when their immune system is a little bit kind of down, and it’s not as easy for them to fight the worms off. So those are some of the main things that we’ve done, of course, excellent nutrition in our herd. We monitor our mineral levels. So we just stay on top of all those foundation things. And a whole lot of stuff in the basket has made a big, big, big difference for us.

We no longer have a–knock on wood–we no longer have a worm problem, and we are slowly getting back to the point where our benzimidazole class of dewormers is beginning to work for us. The other thing is, I have some issues with copper deficiency here in my herd, so I’m a very big advocate of using copper oxide wire particles as a dewormer. And because I know I need to use it to keep my animals in a good copper standing, I try to time dosing for copper bolusing around times where it’s going to also mostly benefit them as a dewormer. And then, I don’t bolus everybody in the herd at the same time. I try to kind of hold on to the copper availability of what I would need to give for use as a dewormer.

Deborah 20:02
Yeah, that’s what we used to do, because we had a problem with copper deficiency also and dewormer resistance. And I really think one of the reasons that we came out of it the way we did eventually, was that we would give the goats the copper oxide. We’d give it to the does, like the day they kidded, you know, and it served that double purpose. Like it raised their copper level, and it also killed a lot of the barber pole worms that tend to overpopulate after kidding.

I know you also used sericea lespedeza for a time period. I think that was before BioWorma was available. Can you talk about that a little bit and how you did that?

Tammy 20:43
Yeah, that was one of the very first things that I tried, and it was very successful. The issue that I had was–so there’s a few problems with it. It’s very expensive, and a large portion of the animal’s diet has to be sericea lespedeza in order for it to be effective in barber pole control. So the cost was an issue, but it was worth it at the time. We were just trying to get a handle on things.

The other problem that I ran into is it’s hard to source, and finding people that carry it is a real challenge. I was able to find someone who carried it not too far from here, but he wouldn’t keep it in stock regularly. And when you are feeding that, it has to stay in the goat’s system. As soon as it’s out of the goat’s system, you’ve got a problem on your hands again. So it’s something that has to kind of continuously be fed into the machine to keep the machine free of the bugs. So once we got BioWorma going, we let that kind of fall off.

Deborah 22:01
Yeah.

Tammy 22:02
We did look into planting sericea lespedeza. It’s quite a chore. So because we had already have a lot of native growth out on our pastures, and there’s Bermuda in our pastures (sericea lespedeza does not like the competition of Bermuda grass), and so in order to get it to take, I was looking at having to obliterate what was on my pastures, and I wasn’t willing to use something like Round-Up out on my pastures to get rid of all of the vegetation. That’s just not something I wasn’t willing to do.

And also, it takes a while to get it established, so you can’t graze it the first year. The stand won’t hold up as well if you graze it the first year. So it’s quite a process to get that stuff growing. So there was just a few drawbacks for us on that.

Deborah 23:02
Yeah, I’m so glad that you mentioned all those details, because it sounds like such an easy solution, like, Oh, I’m just gonna plant some lespedeza in my pasture, and it’ll all be good. Especially because in some parts of the country, it’s a noxious weed. It grows wild, but it’s just not that easy to get it established. So–

Tammy 23:24
Yeah, it also has to have a special inoculant on it–the seed does–for it to take. So there’s a bit of a process. You can’t–it’s not just as easy as going to purchase the seeds and putting it out and boom, everything’s great. It’s–there’s quite a bit of a process to it.

Deborah 23:43
Yeah, like, I know a lot of people overseed with alfalfa. They just take out a coffee can, and towards the end of winter just sprinkle the alfalfa out on the pasture here in Illinois. It is not that easy.

So that’s why I never tried it. I was very, very tempted to try it, and then I tend to have that problem analysis paralysis, and I never got it planted. And in the meantime, Mother Nature called my herd and got rid of all the goats that were not resistant to parasites. And we also learned about rotational grazing and all those other things.

So, it has been so wonderful talking to you today, and hopefully your story will help people understand why if John Smith says, “Oh, well, I’m doing this, and my goats are fine.” And it sounds like it’s all the wrong things, it’s like, well, yeah, he’s wasting his money on all those dewormers because there’s something else going on, you know. So, like, years ago, I sold goats to a lady who knew she had–she was from Tennessee–she knew she had pastures that were naturally full of lespedeza, and so she had no parasite problems. But she knew that, so she could have been doing everything wrong, but since her goats were eating lespedeza all day long every day, they didn’t have any parasite problems.

Tammy 25:05
And that’s such an important point, because when it comes to parasites and the management of our goats with parasites, our properties are so individual. What we have growing, how much we have growing, how much browse, how much pasture, you know? How lush is your pasture? How many animals do you have on, you know, certain areas of your pasture there? There are so many things to think about when we are talking about parasite management.

So it’s very difficult to go on social media and get an answer from someone that is going to work for you, because you don’t know what all the environment is giving that person that’s in their favor, that has given you that advice. And there is no simple answer to parasite management. And I think at the end of the day, that’s the moral of the story.

It’s not easy. It’s going to take effort. There’s going to be some work involved. There’s going to be some research involved. There’s going to be some trial and error involved. You have to find what works for you on your property, and that’s why it’s so important to be really well educated about all the different management practices that are recommended, that are out there.

There may be 15 or 20 different management practices. You may only need to implement two of them. You may need to implement six of them. You may need to start with 12 and then back down to two once you get your problem under control. So it’s definitely worth putting the time, effort, and energy into educating yourself so that you can make the best management decisions for your animals.

Deborah 26:59
Yeah, and just every single farm is different. I appreciate how much you have stressed that. Recently in our Goats 365 discussion, we were talking about a parasite issue, and I remembered that Dr. Hart, who is retired now from Langston University, he said the most challenging parasite problem he ever had was when he was working with this herd that had their goats on concrete. And he could not figure out what–like he spent so much time with these people on the phone and on email–and he could not figure out why they had goats dying from worms, until he actually went to the farm and saw that around the perimeter there was grass. All the poop was going out to that grass from the concrete.

And they sampled the grass and found that the weight of the parasite larva was more than the weight of the grass. Like a single bite of that grass would just put millions of worms into these goats’ guts. It’s just crazy.

Tammy 28:07
Yeah, it is. And if you think about barber pole worms, for example, you know the female worms are laying 1000s. One female worm is laying 1000s of eggs every single day. That’s her job. She’s just, she’s drinking blood, and she’s churning out eggs. And they’re just coming out in mass on your pastures. And you know, it’s when you really kind of start looking into the biology of all that, it’s really scary. When I first started researching this, I would lay in bed at night and it just would roll through my head, and I knew I had to get things under control, because just letting them poop out 1000s of eggs out on my pastures for my goats to eat and then die. I wasn’t–I wasn’t going to do it anymore.

Deborah 29:00
Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really hope that if people felt overwhelmed by all of the sciency things we’ve done with vet proofers and researchers, I really hope that by hearing your story that it has helped them to really understand how all of those different little pieces fit into the story of a single herd of goats.

So is there anything else that you think people need to hear before we sign off today?

Tammy 29:25
Well, I would really highly encourage people to if they’re having, especially barber pole problems, get FAMACHA certified. Learn about what you need to do to get your problem under control. You can only chase your problem with dewormers for a limited amount of time. Learn about management techniques, learn about how to use your dewormers correctly, and how to monitor your herd.

Deborah 29:53
Yeah, exactly. And we do have FAMACHA training, because you and I are both certified FAMACHA instructors, we do have FAMACHA training in our Goats 365 membership. That’s part of it. And so we’re always in there answering questions and stuff to help you figure out how to fit this into your herd. And we ask for pictures and stuff so we can see, like, Oh, are you one of those people? Like, maybe you’ve got a concrete dry lot, but is all the poop going to the side and concentrating the larva there? Because every story is going to be a little bit different.

Tammy 30:28
And we hear lots of stories, so many, so many different stories. There’s so many different scenarios where people are trying their best to do all the right things, but sometimes there’s just something in there that’s kind of sabotaging the whole thing. And you know, we do work really hard to try to help people figure that out.

Deborah 30:51
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

Tammy 30:54
Absolutely, it’s been my pleasure.

Deborah 30:57
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!