Unfortunately, AislingQuoy is facing a bit of difficulty with worm issues in the goats. Quite a few of them are looking rather thin and off-color, have low appetites, and we’ve noticed a big drop in milk production. Once the animals seem to reach an uncomfortable level of illness it’s important to get further data on their conditions and treat them as needed.

One way to tell how an animal is doing is to lift up their eyelids and check for paleness. A healthy goat will have a nice pink color, and a sick goat may have a pale eyelid because worms cause anemia which in turn lowers blood flow. A few of the goats didn’t check out to be too good so more testing was needed. Alas, we decided to do a fecal exam and get an egg count. The worms spread by releasing eggs into the feces, which hatch on the grass and then the other animals in the paddock eat the larvae off the grass. We sat around their pasture and carefully waited for each one to poop so we could collect and label it for the count. After gathering samples from all the ill goats we prepared them for microscope slides. This was done by placing 2 grams of each feces in a small strainer and slowly adding 28 mls of saturated saline solution. We worked the saline through the sample and got a bunch of brown goopy water in the bottom, full of eggs. We then used the dropper to fill the slides with the feces solution and let it sit for two minutes so the eggs could rise to the top of the slide.

  

Once the sample was in the microscope we used the grid lines to count how many eggs we saw and noted which kind of worms they were. The two kinds we found were Coccidia and Barber Pole (Haemonchus contortus). They look kind of similar, both oval shapes, except that the Coccidia were much smaller.

 

Sadly our results were that almost everyone we tested had ridiculously high counts. We decided to treat 3 of our milkers who had serious issues. The treatment is a really gross chemical called Matrix and it looks like purple paint. We had to feed it to them with a plunger syringe and they all turned away and tried to avoid it because they know it tastes really bad. It made Lyndal, Maddy and I all pretty sad to give it to them because we all believe organic practices are to be followed, but it was for their own good and animal welfare is always the most important thing to remember. It’s just not moral to keep an animal suffering. There is a milk withholding period of 35 days associated with the medicine. It’s going to be hard because we have to keep milking them and just discarding the milk because if we don’t, their lactation season will end now until they have another baby because their bodies won’t see a reason to keep production up, and then after the 35 days we’d lose some useful milk down the road. If we keep milking them morning and evening now they will produce milk for another couple months. For now we are just going to be feeding the milk to the pigs but we’re looking into other options for milk use, like potentially storing it in a friends freezer and bottle-feeding it to baby goats next season.

Anyways, we learned a decent bit about assessing severity of parasite problems and what treating them means. Not one of the best days on the farm but that’s what life is like raising animals sometimes.