Hello Reader,

The first two years we owned goats, I didn’t think parasites were a problem. In fact, I even said that goats had survived for centuries before the invention of dewormers, so obviously they didn’t need them.

To buoy my confidence even more, a vet tech professor at the college where my husband teaches asked my husband if he’d bring in goat poop for his students to do fecal exams. We were excited to provide our goat poop for the students to practice, and we were so proud when the professor came back and said that our goats had absolutely no worms at all – nada, zero, zilch! None of the students could find even one worm egg! Since he was a small animal vet, he didn’t see that for the big red flag that it was, and being new goat owners, we were just so proud. There was “proof” that we were doing everything right. 🤦‍♀️Our mistake was picking up poop in the barn that had been sitting on the straw for who-knows-how-long, so of course, all of the eggs had already hatched, and the fecals were “clean.”

Then we bought Tom Selleck, a new buckling, and immediately put him into the pen with my other bucks. A couple of weeks later, I took a fecal sample to the vet. She said he had a heavy load of barber pole worms and tapeworms and should be given a dewormer for three days.

A week later, we found him unable to stand and rushed him to the University of Illinois Veterinary Hospital. Within less than an hour of our arrival, he was dead.

A necropsy showed that he had died from anemia caused by the barber pole worms. I was confused because we had just given him a dewormer. When I talked to the woman at the farm he had come from, she said, “Well, everyone knows that dewormer doesn’t work.” That was my first lesson in dewormer resistance.

That particular dewormer had always worked well on my farm, but the internal parasites on the other farm had developed resistance to it. Not only did I lose a buckling, but we then had worms on our pasture that were resistant to the dewormer we had been using.

The vet told me to start deworming the bucks monthly, which I did, not knowing at the time that it was a terrible idea, which would lead to even more dewormer resistance. A couple months later, two more bucks died from parasites. It was bad enough to lose one goat, but it was even worse to lose three.

You may think that if you are buying your goats from a herd that has tested negative for all of the most insidious diseases there is no need to quarantine. However, it is sometimes the simplest things, such as parasites, that can cause the biggest problems.

We did so many things wrong in the first few years of owning goats, but in my defense, we were doing what the vets said to do – what everyone else was doing at the time. To save my goats from worms, I eventually dove into the emerging research that was happening in the early 2000s, and we eventually got things turned around with proper management.

I didn’t buy a bunch of drugs, supplements, herbs, or anything else to save my goats. Controlling worms on your farm is about management, and in the past decade, most of the goats on my farm go through life without ever needing a dewormer.

I’m not wasting my time and money on an outdated practice like routine deworming with chemicals or herbs. It’s breaking my heart right now to keep seeing subject lines in my inbox from online farm stores encouraging me to “stock up on dewormers!” because I know that goat owners who don’t know the research are going to fall for the marketing blitz, thinking that they are doing what’s best for their goats.

After I learned enough to save my goats from worms and nutritional deficiencies, I had learned enough to write a 300-page book on raising goats, so that’s what I did. But because paper is expensive, a book can only be so long. Although the book does include all the basic information you need to know to manage parasites, some of us – like me – want to know more!

If you want to understand the science behind the current research on parasite management in small ruminants, that’s what I’m talking about in my online course, Parasites in Goats. I’m not just telling you to copy what I did – because conditions vary from farm to farm. You really need to know the WHY behind WHAT to do. My goal is to make you the expert on managing parasites on your farm.

In addition to videos with me, vet professors, and parasite researchers, you can also get FAMACHA training and a FAMACHA card for accurately scoring the eyelids of your goats and sheep when checking for anemia that can be caused by the barber pole worm.

If you deworm more than 10% of your goats annually, you need to learn how to manage parasites on your farm – before the dewormers stop working. Unlike a bottle of dewormer, which expires, you’ll get lifetime access to the course so you can stay up to date as new information is posted.

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Happy spring,
Deborah

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