Hello Reader,

During chore time in the middle of a freezing winter more than a decade ago, I saw Tennessee Williams, one of my bucks, fall down when another goat walked past him and barely touched him. That was obviously not good. I separated him from the other bucks so they wouldn’t bother him and so that he wouldn’t give them whatever was making him sick.

I checked his eyelids, and they were white, so I did a fecal analysis. The slide was covered with roundworm eggs. I gave him a double dose of the herbal dewormer I had recently purchased online in my quest to find something that would work since the chemical dewormers had stopped working on our farm. After several days of giving him the herbal dewormer and seeing no outward improvement, I did another fecal, and the slide was again covered with eggs. The herbal dewormer had not killed any worms.

In my head, the voices of vets from the past were telling me to give all the bucks a dewormer “because it just makes sense that if this one is so badly infected, the other ones are too.”

But I had been reading a lot of research and knew that was no longer accepted as dogma. Instead of deworming, I went into the pen and checked eyelids for symptoms of anemia, and then I waited for them to poop. I collected a fresh sample and did a fecal on a buck, as well as two does. I found very few parasite eggs on any of the slides. I was moving the slides from side to side and finding a solitary egg here and there for a total of two or three eggs on each slide.

Thinking that this was an unlikely result, I repeated the exams on fresh poop and got the same results. Seeing that none of the other bucks were anemic and finding a negligible number of eggs in the fecals, I hesitantly decided not to give the other bucks any type of dewormer.

Unfortunately, Tennessee continued to decline over the next week. He could no longer stand at all, and I needed to move him to clean straw regularly because he was peeing and pooping where he was lying. I gave him a chemical dewormer, but it didn’t reduce the worm load either.

I was amazed by his ability to hang on because most goats are either on the mend or dead within a day or two of going down. Maybe the herbs had boosted his immune system, even though they didn’t kill the worms. Maybe he was just stronger than most because his dam is the most parasite-resistant goat in the herd. In the end, the worms prevailed, and Tennessee died. As the weeks passed, the physical condition of the other bucks remained robust, and none of them required a dewormer.

If you have already experienced dewormer resistance within your herd, there is hope. At one time, researchers said that once a herd had a resistance problem, it would last forever. However, in my experience, it can be reversed, and research has now confirmed that.

After having three goats die from parasites in four months, I began to use chemical dewormers faithfully, and I rotated them regularly, which was the standard advice 15 years ago. Within about four years, nothing worked well, and my goats were dying in spite of using chemical dewormers.

At that point I got very serious about doing whatever I needed to do to avoid having a parasite overload in the goats, which included rotating pastures and kidding during the dead of winter when parasites are mostly dormant. I stopped using dewormers. After about three years, I had a goat with a heavy load of parasites, and when I used a chemical dewormer, it caused a significant reduction in the fecal egg count.

Unfortunately, this old advice to routinely deworm goats and rotate dewormers is still out there after all these years! There is no controversy about this! All of the research agrees that you should NEVER give a dewormer to a goat unless it is sick from worms, and rotating dewormers is not helpful. In fact, if you are giving a dewormer to more than 10% of your goats per year, then management needs to be improved.

The only reason you see this old information is because nothing online ever dies. And sadly, old vets are not doing their continuing education in goat parasites because they are not aware of the new research. Plus most don’t see many goats, so they get their continuing ed credits in dogs, cats, cows, horses, and whatever else they see a lot.

Where can you find the most current information on managing parasites in your herd? In our Parasites in Goats course, which includes hours of videos with parasite researchers, as well as FAMACHA training. As a certified FAMACHA instructor with the American Consortium of Small Ruminant Parasite Control, I have FAMACHA cards that I can issue to all students who successfully complete the training, pass the quiz, and create a 30-second video showing the proper technique for checking a goat’s eyelids.
​

We went from helplessly watching goats die from worms 15 years ago to having a healthy, productive herd where most goats never get a dewormer in their entire lives. You can do this too! It’s not about copying what I’m doing – or what anyone is doing – because conditions vary from farm to farm. When you understand the parasite life cycle, you can learn how to manage parasites on your farm, which may differ from what someone else is doing.

Whether you are already on the dewormer treadmill or just getting started with goats, I hope you’ll join me in the course to learn how to manage parasites in your herd.

​
Happy spring!
Deborah

​

P.S. If you're not interested in learning about goat parasites at this time, simply click here, and you won't receive any further emails.