Dairy Goats & Parasite Prevention

Video Transcript

"Okay, today we're going to talk about keeping your goats healthy in reference to intestinal parasites. Now it's not a real pleasant topic, but it's an important one if you're going to keep goats. Goats do get worms. In fact, they all have them. It's not a matter of eliminating the worms so much as it is to manage the load. Some people do their own home fecal tests with a microscope and examine the feces for worm larva to determine how much, how much load they have. However, if you're around your goats and if you watch the signs and symptoms, you can generally tell. Some of the signs of parasites are that they get a whitening of the gums and the whites of the eyes, and they start to look anemic and they might act sick. You might see diarrhea or other signs that they're just not quite right. The main prevention for worms is to rotate your pastures because the life cycle of the worm is such that the larva, they come out in the stool. The larva hatch out, the eggs hatch out and they grow. They climb up onto the weeds and grass and then the goats re-ingest them and end up getting infected. There's several ways, if you have a serious worm problem, that you can treat them with, whether with injectable medicine, or a paste that's given to them orally. And you might choose a time to do that right before they go on pasture or right after the frost. Also if you've treated your worms with worm medicine, you can't drink the milk or eat the meat for a certain number of days. So it might be wise to wait until they're dried off or late in pregnancy to do the worming."