On Friday, we received our final update on Meow – the lab results were inconclusive because there were no relevant bacteria or parasites found in the culture, but their findings when looking at his intestines indicated poisoning, enterotoxemia, or coccidiosis.
When we went out to check everyone this morning, one of our sweetest yearling girls didn’t come to greet us with the rest. We found her shortly after, passed away.
This summer, Raz came to us with a pretty high barber pole worm load and we successfully treated her – her FEC was zero, her anemia and mild bottle jaw were gone, and her coat was back to normal.
Last night, Ken and I both had spent time giving her scritches along with the other girls and hadn’t noticed anything off – she was showing interest in the bucks, so I had thought that maybe she was going back into heat, but that was the only thing we had noted. She’s always been a little smaller than our other yearlings and seemed kinda derpy/slow in the head, but we thought that was just her. She left fully formed pellets, so we ran a fecal on those and her FEC was 400, which isn’t great but also isn’t terrible. We have no idea what took her out. We’d prefer to do a necropsy but unfortunately, the vet is closed for the weekend and we have nowhere to store her until tomorrow. We buried her.
Google says that the most common causes of sudden goat death are poisoning, enterotoxemia, or silent pneumonia. Meow and Raz had different symptoms, but losing two formerly healthy goats so close together is very suspicious – especially when they share two possible causes. We combed both goat pens again for any possible toxic plants. There was a mushroom on the girls’ side, but it looked untouched. Everything else was just the ash, pine, and grass that have always been there.
Just to be safe, we’re going to boost everyone with Cavalry 9 for clostridium and Nasalgen 3 PMH-IN for pneumonia.
