It is important that you never play with your goats as if you were a goat. That means that you should not “butt heads” with them. This may sound like common sense, but I’ve heard of far too many people doing this with cute little five-pound kids. The problem is that those kids grow up, and they don’t understand that the rules have changed. They think you are one of the herd, and they will continue to communicate with you as if you were a goat, which means they will butt you whenever the urge hits them. It is also a bad idea to put out your hand and let them butt it. Goats butt to establish dominance, and that is one power play you never want to get into with them because at some point you will lose when they decide to slam into your legs when your back is turned.
Social Order
One of the hardest things for humans to understand is why goats are so mean to each other. And sometimes the goats that are the most outgoing towards humans are the roughest with other goats. They butt heads and slam their heads into other goats’ sides. It can be scary to those of us looking on and tends to be especially bad when a new goat is introduced to the herd. For this reason, I try very hard never to add an individual goat to the herd. When goats have been separated for kidding, I put them into groups of three or four initially so the head butting gets spread around a little more than if only two goats were put together.
It is also important to be sure that you have plenty of space for all the goats to fit in front of hay feeders and feed pans. If the goats are crowded, the more dominant goats will get most of the feed. When feeding grain in a pan, it is best to use a fence-line feeder rather than a pan in the middle of the pasture because goats will butt heads over the pan and often wind up running through the pan, knocking it over, and spilling the feed. If you already have feed pans, placing them next to a wall or in a corner will reduce head butting compared with placing them in a space where the goats can circle around the pans.
A feeder attached to a fence or a wall discourages head butting during feeding because all of the goats are facing the same direction.
Usually, in spite of the severity of the head banging, no one gets hurt. Every now and again, a goat might wind up with a little blood on the top of its head, especially if it has scurs, but long-term injury is extremely rare. In most cases one of the goats will give up and refuse to continue fighting, but I did have a buck wind up with a concussion once. I had owned goats for eight years when one night I saw two bucks butting heads at sundown. I ignored it because no one had ever been hurt in the past. The next morning, however, the smaller buck was staggering around and stumbling, and his eyes were operating independently of each other, moving in different directions. Luckily, he did recover, but I no longer ignore bucks fighting.
Even scarier than bucks butting heads, however, are pregnant does fighting. In most cases goats will butt heads for a few minutes when first introduced, and once in a while they’ll hit each other with their heads if they want hay or grain that the other one is eating. But every year or two, there seems to be a doe that no one likes. They won’t let her have her share of hay, and sometimes they’ll even try to keep her out of the shelter. It can get especially scary if the underdog is pregnant. In those cases it’s a good idea to put her in a different pen with a younger, smaller, or less dominant doe as a companion.
Intervention
Do not ever put yourself between two goats that are fighting, not even if they are little Nigerian Dwarf does, because they can hurt you. Those hard little heads can pack quite a wallop against your knees or shins. A collar on a goat makes it easier to handle the animal when you want to move it from one place to another. To separate two goats that are seriously trying to hurt each other — not just a few head butts — stand behind one and grab it by the collar and pull it away from the other one. Do not turn your back on the other goat, especially if it is a buck. If you are dealing with 250-pound standard bucks, you need someone else to handle the other buck. The fact that you are holding one of the goats will not stop the other one from taking advantage and slamming into the goat that you are holding. When you separate goats, especially bucks, you need more than just a fence between them because they can continue butting heads through a fence and wind up hurting themselves. One of my bucks injured his eye butting heads with a buck in the next pen. In most herds you won’t have to separate goats very often. With a herd of around 20 does and 5 bucks, I don’t think I’ve ever had to do it more than once a year. After a few hours, when tempers have cooled, the goats can be reunited again. However, if I find that the herd never really accepts a goat, I will sell that animal because, quite simply, I feel sorry for it. I’ve only had to do this twice, and both cases were young does that had been born here and were continually picked on from about a year old until I finally sold them a few months later.
Collars
While cattle and sheep usually wear halters, goats usually wear collars if they are handled regularly. Most dairy goats are taught to lead when someone is holding the collar, and with standard-sized goats, the collar is right at the level of your hand, so it’s very convenient and comfortable. With Nigerian Dwarf or miniature dairy goats, however, you may have to bend over a little. For this reason, some people will use a leash on a smaller goat when leading it a longer distance. You can use simple dog collars, or you can buy special plastic link collars that break under pressure so that your goats don’t accidentally hang themselves on a tree limb when browsing.
When a goat is browsing, it can easily get its collar caught on a tree limb, which is why some people use a breakaway collar. It looks like a plastic chain, but will break when 60 pounds of force is exerted on it.
Anatomy
Unlike the majority of mammals, including humans, dogs, cats, rabbits, horses, and pigs, which have only one stomach, goats have four stomachs. They fall into the category of ruminants, which also includes cows and sheep. Ruminants spend a huge part of the day eating and re-eating their food. A goat walks around in the pasture eating grass, weeds, tree leaves, and small bushes, and when the rumen gets full, it lies down somewhere and starts the process of bringing up its cud to chew everything a second time and send it on to the next stomach. The rumen is on the goat’s left side, and some goats will really stuff themselves before they decide to stop eating, which means they can look quite lopsided for an hour or so. Many years ago when my daughters showed goats, they would take the hay out of their pen about an hour before they expected to go into the show ring so that the goats would look more balanced.
While many parts of a goat are the same as a dog or cat — head, ears, tail, etc. — there are a few parts of the anatomy that you may not have heard of before.
Health
If, like me prior to getting goats, your livestock experience consists of cats and dogs, you are probably accustomed to simply taking an animal to the vet whenever something is amiss. However, if you have more than a few goats, this gets expensive very quickly. And, unlike small-animal vets, who can be found in every community, large-animal vets are rare and sometimes impossible to find in some areas. Depending on where you live and where the nearest large-animal vet is located, a trip to the vet could mean a long drive. For these reasons, many goat owners need enough information to at least begin to figure out when a goat is sick and whether they can treat it with over-the-counter medication or need to take it to the vet.
A doe with a wide area of attachment in her rear udder, such as this one, which is shaped like an upside down U, will hold up better through the years than one with a very small area of attachment, which looks more like an upside down V.
After losing three bucks in a four-month period, I became downright paranoid about my goats dying, and one day I rushed a buck down to the university veterinary hospital two hours away because I thought he looked sick. It was nine o’clock at night, and the on-call vet had been painting her basement when she was called in to the clinic. I don’t even remember the buck’s symptoms any longer, but I do remember the vet’s initial assessment of him as she s
quatted and watched him walk up to her. She said, “I have a hard time getting too excited about a goat that’s walking around, eating, drinking, and chewing his cud.” In other words, he would have survived until morning. After lots of tests, he was pronounced healthy, and we went home around midnight. Since then, I always ask myself four questions when I start to worry about a goat’s health:
▶ Is it walking around?
▶ Is it drinking?
▶ Is it eating?
▶ Is it chewing its cud?
If you can answer yes to all four of those questions, the goat is probably fine. “Going off feed” is one of the first signs of many illnesses in goats, and if a goat is unable to stand and walk around, something is seriously wrong.
THIS YEAR we experienced our first case of pregnancy toxemia in one of our does. We have a small herd of twelve does who normally graze together, going to and from the barn several times daily to get water, moving about our three-acre pasture. At the time, our doe was almost two years old and about to freshen for the second time. She was a month from kidding, approximately 115 days into her pregnancy, when we first noticed her with the herd. While the rest of the herd was grazing, she was lying down. I took a mental note and observed. A few more days passed, and I noticed her repeating the lying down behavior — continuing to remain with the herd but lying down among them, resting. It worried me because this was abnormal, especially for her.
After a week of such behavior, I called my vet who came over the same day, and diagnosed her with pregnancy toxemia, as I suspected. His way of diagnosis was simple: behavior observation and testing her urine using Ketostix (bought at any local pharmacy). These strips, often used by humans who have diabetes, measure the level of ketones being spilled into the urine. She measured “heavy” on the color scale on the bottle of test strips, so the vet instructed us to use Nutri-Drench daily (or propylene glycol, which is the main ingredient in Nutri-Drench but is not as palatable) and to continue monitoring her. We did so, giving it to her daily (at a 10 cc dose) depending on the color of the Ketostix. She continually improved and eventually stopped lying around during grazing time. The vet also informed me that does who present with this condition are typically over-conditioned or overweight, but my doe didn’t fit that description. The vet said that in some cases a doe that previously freshened with a single kid and is now carrying multiples can develop toxemia. Thankfully, the month passed and she kidded normally, bearing triplets.
— HUNTER DAVIS,
Hawks View Farm Nigerian Dwarf Goats,
Harrisonburg, Virginia
Condition
Always be aware of a goat’s body condition. You should be able to feel the bones, but they should have some meat on them. The only bone that should feel sharp is the withers. Often a good way to assess body condition is to look at the underside of the tail because there is no hair on it, so you can see the skin easily. A goat’s tail should look triangular — wide at the base with a good amount of meat on it, tapering into a triangle toward the end of the tail. If there is little or no meat at the base of the tail, the goat is likely underweight. On the other hand, if the tail is meaty all the way to the tip, the goat is probably overweight. It amazes me how fast a goat can lose body condition when it is sick.
This goat is underweight as you can see from how sunken-in her abdomen is. When I ran my hands down her spine, it felt very sharp with no meat on it. It turned out that she had a heavy load of parasites, and within a few days of treatment, she began to regain body condition quickly.
Temperature
Taking a goat’s temperature is a good first step in determining whether a goat has an infection. Goats do not regulate their body temperature as well as some animals, so most textbooks don’t have a single number listed as the normal temperature. Everyone agrees that 102–103°F is fine, but some books say that anything up to 104°F is still normal. In my experience, however, a goat is pretty sick if its temperature is that high. A temperature below 101°F also indicates the goat is very sick. A high temperature means the goat’s body is fighting something; a low temperature often means the body is shutting down. A low temperature in a doe that is at the end of pregnancy or has recently given birth can also be a symptom of milk fever.
Digestion
New goat owners are sometimes scared by odd noises coming from a goat’s abdomen or throat. In most cases you don’t hear anything when a goat brings up its cud, but sometimes you do hear a little squeak just before you see the goat start to chew. If you put your ear up to a goat’s rumen on the left side of the abdomen, you should hear at least one or two digestive noises per minute, but you will often hear a lot more than that. Sometimes you can also see movement in the abdomen, which leads some people to incorrectly assume the goat is pregnant.
Eyelids
The inside of a goat’s eyelid should be bright pink or red. If it is pale pink or white, the goat is anemic. Although anemia is most often caused by barber pole worm, it could have other causes, such as lice or copper deficiency.
Feces
Normal goat poop looks like loose pebbles, beans, or berries. They should not stick together, and the poop should not look like a little log. You should not see anything in the poop that looks like undigested rice or grain, and, of course, diarrhea is bad. Abnormal poop can be a sign of parasitism, too much grain, or other problems in the goat’s diet.
Grooming
Goats really do not need much in the way of grooming unless you are planning to show. Although some people use dog clippers to trim the hair on the udder, it is a matter of personal preference. As a rule, goats tend to be very clean animals, so they will rarely get dirty enough to need a bath. The only time we bathe our goats is before clipping them because dirt will dull clipper blades quickly. Because we no longer show our goats, we clip them only if one gets lice or in preparation for taking pictures for our website. It is usually impossible to get a good idea of a goat’s conformation from looking at a photo of an unclipped animal. Ideally, you want to put your hands on a goat to examine its physical characteristics, but if you are interested in buying a kid from a herd that is a thousand miles away, it is nice to see pictures of the dam and sire after they have been clipped.
You should be able to draw a straight line down a goat’s leg to its hoof. You can see that this hoof is so overgrown that it’s forcing the goat’s leg into an unhealthy position.
Hooves
You should purchase hoof trimmers before you bring home your goats or very soon after. Although someone can hold a kid while you trim its hooves, it is easiest to put an adult goat on a milk stand for its pedicure. Trimming a goat’s hoof is a lot like trimming your own nails. Just cut off the extra hoof material, which usually curls under each toe. Attempting to cut off enough hoof to create a “perfect” square hoof, which you may have seen in some drawings, can result in profuse bleeding and infection. If you can’t make your goat’s hooves look perfect, don’t worry. Most people don’t have perfect feet either.
In general, goats need a pedicure every month or two. When the hooves get overgrown, it is bad for the goat’s pasterns, and it makes the job of hoof trimming more difficult. If you go too long between trimmings, the sole of the hoof starts to grow out, making it difficult to trim off enough of the hoof without cutting into the skin and making it bleed. To correct an overgrown hoof, just take off as much as you can without cutting into the soft part under the hoof. As the goat walks around, the sole will get pushed back, and you will be able to cut off more of the hoof in a couple of weeks.
A Nigerian Dwarf doe on a milk stand with her head locked in place. My husband stands on the goat’s left side, leaning over her body to hold it in place, and holding her right rear leg in his left hand. Never point hoof trimmers in the direction of the hand holding the hoof; if the goat kicks at the moment you snip, you could wind up cutting yourself. To be even safer, wear a leather glove on the hand holding the hoof.
First Aid Supplies
Y
ou may already have many of the items you need when it comes to dealing with minor injuries or illnesses with your goats, although you should probably buy additional supplies to keep in the barn so that it is easier to access them when needed.
Alcohol: Even though many people give injections without cleaning the area first, this can lead to an infection. You’ll be amazed at how much dirt comes off on the cotton swab when you wipe it on the spot you want to inject. You can use alcohol wipes or old-fashioned cotton balls with a bottle of alcohol.
Drenching Syringe: A drenching syringe is used for administering oral medications or herbal tinctures. Unlike a syringe that is used for giving injections, a drenching syringe has a long metal tip that is rounded, which makes it easier and safer to administer oral medications and fluids to the back of the goat’s mouth, making it more difficult for them to spit it out. A 10 cc syringe is sufficient for most goat medications. It is also a good idea to have a larger drenching syringe available to get water into a dehydrated goat. A 30 cc syringe is roughly one ounce, which is a good size for giving water or homemade yogurt, which is rich in probiotics.
Gauze Pads: These are four-inch-square pads that are useful for cleaning wounds. Unlike cotton balls, they are sterile. Do not cover an open wound on a goat. Livestock wounds are usually left open to air and drain. Covering a wound with a bandage is a quick route to infection.
Raising Goats Naturally Page 8