You Can Do Everything Right, And Still….

Something

That I am learning in my adult life is that sometimes you can do EVERYTHING right - and that “scary thing” might still happen. Although admittedly, the scary thing could turn out to be absolutely nothing.

That’s the absurdity and beauty of life. If you have the AUDACITY to live outside of mainstream waters + conventional ways of practice and walk a path labeled “insufficient in evidence “ or “lacking in clinical strength” then prepare to build calluses by means of self based evidence through TRIAL AND ERROR because often the Internet will fail you- because you are creating the path with a very few. This is where MINDSET plays a very crucial part of your journey in raising #holistic #livestock..

STRESS can trigger all sorts of things in your animals and it comes is many forms. Being too hot, being VERY cold (especially if the animals have never experienced that particular type of weather). Weaning, Birth, Food transitions that happen to quickly, you name it.

A few weeks ago before the Polar Storm hit us in East KY, we were vigilant and found a great source of mixed grass hay and straw down the street to prepare everyone with food and clean warm bedding.

Just days after we began feeding strictly the hay since everything was now buried in snow, I noticed some blood on my does rear end. I thought at first it was a heat cycle. A day later- I noticed was that their stool was in clump formation identical to if you feed to much grain, which we don’t feed especially when access to fresh pasture isn’t available. Finding this odd, I began to pay greater attention to everyone. I did discover that they were not a big fan of drinking the cold water that had been continually breaking the ice off of and I thought it was a simple case of minor dehydration, so we switched to heated water buckets + probiotics in everyone’s water.

Yet another day of so later, I noticed my young buck had a messy bottom with dark stool all over and at that point, I began to suspect and fear there was something terribly wrong with the feed. Perhaps something toxic had been bailed in it by accident? We tore through the other three bails and couldn’t identify anything! The same young buck eventually passed a very goopy stool with mucus and blood. There is only a few things that can cause this and often it’s Toxic plan ingestion, Coccidiosis, Barber Pole Worm or a few other parasites.

this photo taken 5 days after blood was passed in stool by young buck, indicating symptoms are elevating vs getting worse.

Here’s The Thing

If you're going to have a goat that is dying from illness or parasitic overload (some parasites are more dangerous that others)- typically you are going to have anemia, loss of apatite, loss of condition (weight loss) lethargy, and a host of other problems. Throughout it all, every goat was happy with bright alert faces, was still eating A LOT, had great coats on them and no weight loss. The only other symptom was a low scoring on the FAMACHA charts, around a 3, that cleared within days and rose to a normal healthy share of red. There fact that they were still in high spirits was the only thing keeping me hopeful in the face of what seemed like a killer. Mindset is everything. We have a tendency in these circumstances to become problem focused and feel bad for ourselves, blame ourselves and create distraction away from our solution. I decided to call a vet (even though I was iced in and couldn’t drive out for several days) I asked if I could speak directly to a vet for just some simple advice and never got a call back. I googled for days even caved and used chat GPT. When I would get an answer, even if it didn’t completely fit the bill, I searched for natural ways to fix the problem and here’s what I gathered from it all….

ONE

Even for the scarry things, the cure for it turned out to be the same oils and treatments that I would have decided to use and that I immediately started on. Only difference that I could find was in my dosages, calling for much larger quantities than I typically administer. OREGANO OIL, GARLIC EXTRACT, and some others contain anticoccidial compounds that can effectively treat the big bad bug as I call it- COCIDIOSIS, which plagues many goat producers. It’s also proven to deworm for a broad spectrum of parasites including the BARBER POLE WORM which is another parasite that is hard to get rid of in goats.

TWO

Your first reaction is usually to adjust to the fear. You may want to give in and throw principal to the wind, even more so when you love and care for these animals the way we do. However, given enough time, we need to be understanding of the TRUTH. The truth is, sometimes we are going to loose an animal during our learning curves and if we are not ok with holding out as long as we can (as long as the animal isn’t suffering) than we are never going to fortify ourselves in the knowledge required to help us and others make better more informed choices in the future should situations like this occur again. That may seem seam particularly coarse to some, but, as you and I who work with livestock know, it is the world that we live in. I would rather push the limits while my animals still seemed to be happy despite scary symptoms and break the mainstream need to having to use traditional anticoccidants like CORID which disables the animals small intestines from being able to absorb and up-regulate B vitamins, thus having to supplement with synthetic vitamins. The cost of using human grade whole food vitamins for the length of time needed during the medication administration would be astronomical.

SO WHAT AM I GOING TO DO NOW?

EXACTLY what I felt right to do in the first place. Treat for big bad bugs.

I have a shipment of oils coming in soon and in the meantime, I’ve begun feeding pine needles to begin a gentle and natural process of killing whatever parasite it maybe SHOULD that even be the case. Pine, especially Longleaf pine needles, have the same anticoccidial compounds as the oils to which we have plenty on the property. If you’re following us on social media, Instagram in particular, you’ll be seeing reports via stories on progress and prognosis.