(What were we thinking?)
David F. Norman
My wife, Marci, and I were just starting to think we had it figured out in the middle of February when we had our first kids born. Angel and Jersey were nine- and ten-pound does and everything went without a hitch. Despite the unusually wet season, everything looked pretty good. Then, despite having had his shots, Bo died of Parvo.
Bo was an Anatollian/Great Pyrenees cross. At four months, he weighed 60 pounds. Except for biting -- possibly accidentally -- one little goat's ear, Bo was coming along as a guard dog. Suddenly he quit eating and began moping around. No external sign he was ill but he went to the vet anyway. Over 100 bucks later, he was at home and the gross symptoms of Parvo were extremely evident. Intra-venous fluid couldn't save him.
We didn't understand. Bo had had three parvo/distemper shots. The injections came from two different feed stores. What happened?
We never did get a good answer but a call to the State of Texas Animal Health Officer gave us the current innoculation regime used by that particular vet. From four weeks of age until AT LEAST 16 weeks, the dogs get an injection every two weeks. Overkill? Possibly, but when conditions are just right for Parvo, the extra injections are cheap insurance. We have since grown five guard dog puppies into young adulthood following that advice. Rule Number Two: If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
We had already signed a contract and been approved for the purchase of 69 acres. This small ranch -- which seemed immense compared with the three acres we were currently living on -- had been a hog farm. When the hog operation was shutdown almost ten years before, except for cutting hay, the ranch had been abandoned. Mesquite, huisatch, and left-over buffel grass almost but not quite hid the caliche road and everything else on the place. We knew the goats would love it.
As such things are wont to do, it dragged on and on and on. The new goats we had purchased in anticipation of the move to larger quarters were becoming a little crowded. Fifty goats -- even small ones -- on three acres is just too many. We know that now. Then we still had it to learn.
Even with the sudden demise of Bo, we still felt pretty good about things. We had been reading about changing wormers periodically and decided to switch from drenching with Ivomec pour-on at one cc per 10kg of weight to Safeguard paste at double that dose. Whoops! We might as well have saved our money and effort for all the good it did. After a couple of weeks, we realized that something was wrong. Some of our finer-looking young does were spending way too much time lying down. We still didn't know what was going on, so we carried the sickest one to the vet.
The dream was starting to become a nightmare. Yes, she was sick, very sick. Yes, she was anemic. And, yes, she was wormy, real wormy. The vet suggested a transfusion so we hauled Brahma, our sturdy, bottle-raised young billie to the vet's and he donated blood in exchange for getting heavily stoned. The doe died anyway. We immediatedly began to reworm all the goats with the Ivermectin. They got drench -- Red Cell -- B shots and we located some sweet lick containing copper for them. We now believe that supplemental copper may be a very large factor in fighting parasites in goats.
Fortunately, most survived. Because most of the goats we had purchased were other people's culls, we have no way of knowing whether or how much the battle with parasites stunted their growth. The good news is that most of them have kidded this year with only one kid so far dying at two days.
Okay, so we got past that violation of Rules Number Two AND Number One (Keep It Simple, Stupid!). Then we came home one afternoon and saw tragedy had struck again. A heavy gust of wind during a thunderstorm had overturned one of the goat sheds and crushed one of the young does -- one who had survived being quite ill. You don't have to drop a shed on Marci or me; we got the message: Anchor the #$@%^&# sheds so they CAN'T blow over.
Hooray! We finally closed on the new ranch on May 28, 2004. Because of a dozen or so inches of rain over the last week, we couldn't get into the ranch until after the first week of June. Forget doing any fence work for another week. During that first week of trying to clear the road of brush so we weren't trying to drive in the pasture -- iffy even for a 4WD pickup -- I managed to seriously bury a 4WD tractor -- with a front-end loader. After two days, it dried up enough so I could work it out. But you get the idea; the ranch resembled a swamp more than a pasture.
Perhaps we should have known that it would be too wet to work? Not likely. The rain in that amount was extremely unusual. Over the 11 months I had been looking at the place, I had no indication that we would face such conditions. Oh well, that too passed. As soon as we got about four acres fenced, we moved the adult goats to their new home. That alleviated the crowding and gave us a little time to complete the move.
Yeah, that is what WE thought. Next came soremouth in the new pasture. Was it there all the time, or did one of the goats we purchased and added to the adults bring it? We will never know and we discovered that soremouth is really not such a big deal. For MOST goats it is not a big deal and one or two never showed any signs of it. For Jersey -- one of our first born-to-us goats -- it was a very big deal. For Pinky, a rather wild white Spanish goat, that had kidded about three months before, it was a big deal.
Jersey developed a severe secondary infection around her anus and genitals. Lots of mean nasty ugly suff on her rear and she would just go nuts if we tried to lift her tail. Five days of 3 cc's Penicillin G took care of it. Pinky just plain went NUTS! She would have nothing to do with us -- not at all unusual -- or go near the other goats. She spent most of four days on top of a 20-foot-high hill in the pasture. But she got over it just like the rest and she kidded a couple of weeks ago with twin billies. ( She still is rather wild and until recently not dog-broke.)
Since we have been on the new ranch, we have lost two nannies. They just got sick and died. One of them we had just treated with pretty much everything we could and we gently moved her 30 feet into the shade of a tree. We watched her lie down and die right there, right then in front of us. The lesson could be not to stress a sick goat or it could be as a long-time goat rancher told us based on bitter experience -- "A sick goat is a dead goat."
We believe that both of these last two goat deaths were due to pneumonia. Probably not much we could have done to prevent either, but you still feel bad when you lose one. It will probably always bother us more than just the loss of our investment. That is one reason we have the guard dogs.
When the sun goes down here, you can usually hear coyotes yipping and howling. The guard dogs also start talking to each other and the would-be predators. So far, at least, we have had no losses to coyotes. Of course, we are feeding the five guard dogs almost 100 pounds of dog food a week.
Now as the end of March, 2005 nears, things are smoothing out. We have had a successful kidding season, adequate fencing for the expanded herd is in place, and the dogs and goats are all healthy. Now we only ask ourselves about once a week why did we want to have goats. When we watch baby nannies climbing all over the guard dogs, then run to find mama and hit her milk bag like it was a punching bag, then go lie down cuddled up with other kids, we know the answer. It is what we are supposed to be doing.