On the exact day we started our latest IVF cycle in the effort to overcome our unexplained infertility, our very best buckling, *B 4Petesake The Cat’s Meow, started acting sick. He was self-isolating and not being his usual sweet, nosey self. The next day, massive amounts of putrid watery green scours started pouring out of him.
The scours stopped after the first day, but Meow also stopped eating and started groaning, drooling, grinding his teeth, standing in what is usually the pee pose (but he was able to urinate normally), and pressing his head on walls. He began to pass clumps of dried yellow mucus with a few normal pellets. People with much more goat experience brought up listeriosis and we were out of penicillin, so we called the vet.
Since Meow had a normal temperature through his whole illness, the vet was against the idea of listeriosis and went with everyone’s default diagnosis for kids – coccidiosis – and prescribed Albon & gave him a bunch of vitamin injections. She also did Draxxin because his lungs were a little rough. The next day, the fecal showed that his count was only moderate at under 1000, but she had us continue the Albon, in the hopes that it would catch whatever this was. She didn’t instruct us to, but we also gave him Banamine because he was clearly in pain and CD Antitoxin because that’s always recommended for digestive issues, even though he was vaccinated & boosted.
Our boy still wasn’t eating or drinking after a couple days, so we called the vet back for Lactated Ringers – we started giving that subcutaneously, about 1000cc spread throughout each day. She said to keep giving him Nutridrench and thiamine and told us that the CBC we requested would be useless & that they don’t do blood transfusions on goats. She and the other vets at the clinic couldn’t recommend any other diagnostic tests/tools.
Meow continued in limbo for over a week, so we started asking more experienced goat owners for help. You can see in the photo how skinny he became, and that was only halfway through his illness. People told us to drench Down Goat Soup (beer, yogurt, molasses, and sweet potato) and smoothies that include fruit and veggies. This unfortunately turned out to be fatal.
After about 3 days of drenching, on the night before our Egg Retrieval for IVF, Meow started clearly going downhill. He had been anemic all along but was starting to look jaundiced and his abdomen was distended and he was crying more again.
While Jess was in surgery, Ken frantically called the vet because it became obvious that our goat was going to die without immediate assistance. He called 3 times over the course of 4 hours with no callback, while our boy screamed in pain. Ken carried him to the car and rushed him to the clinic, but he died in agony on the way.
The vet was at the clinic and had time for a post mortem exam – when she opened up his intestines, all those days worth of smoothies came pouring out. His intestines were too damaged by his still-unknown infection to allow much to pass through, so it just pooled and festered there. The vet sent samples for a culture, but suspects either Clostridium or something viral.
After the crisis had passed, we had a heart to heart with the vet about the whole clinic’s apparent lack of care. She said that most people in the area don’t want to spend money on expensive tests and treatments for their livestock, even though we repeatedly said that we would do anything to save ours. So the next time we have an emergency, in order to get appropriate services, we have to ask them to treat our goats like companion animals.
Lessons learned:
1) If a goat is in severe digestive distress, DO NOT give it soup/smoothies without first at a minimum doing an ultrasound. It can make things a million times worse. Meow might have & probably would have died anyway, but now we’ll never know.
2) We were being too light with Banamine because it can cause fatal damage on its own. We should have taken the risk and given him a full dose daily, but were only doing half daily or a full one on alternate days. It might have kept his intestines from becoming fatally inflamed.
3) The CDT vaccine and CD antitoxin are not effective for all strains of Clostridium – we will be swapping to Calvary 9, which has more coverage. Some sources indicate that multivalent vaccines are less effective because the body might not have enough resources to boost against everything included in the vaccine, but longtime producers have used them with great success – including one of our heroes, Brandi at Vanjust Oberhasli.
4) We need another goat vet. We’ve been thinking about moving to a better area sometime in the next couple years, and this has solidified our decision. If we were closer to the state vet school, we could have taken our buckling there, but it’s over 3 hours away and Meow would not have made the trip on his final day. We should have thought to go there sooner, but we were unfortunately not thinking clearly with all the human medical stuff going on at the same time.
RIP *B 4Petesake The Cat’s Meow, one of the best bucklings in the history of bucklings, gone MUCH too soon.
