*Please note that these are our personal opinions and experiences, and our statements are not intended to be professional or medical advice in any way. We have added links to products that we have used. We are in no way affiliated with the vendors or brands, and we receive no reward or recognition for linking them.
There are many different ways to raise dairy goat kids; from fully hands-off & letting the dams do all the work, to fully hands-on and doing it all ourselves. Because we’re paranoid about diseases, our management style is the latter: we currently pull all kids at birth. CAE is one of the biggest diseases that this protocol prevents – it is one of the Big Three (CAE, CL, Johne’s) that most herds watch out for. We have never tested positive, but have brought in a few new goats over the past couple years and WANT to trust the breeders, but you can never be too careful. After we’ve had at least a few years of clean tests, we might try letting the dams keep their kids, but for now, we will continue to pull them into a separate area at birth. We keep kids separate from adults until our non-keepers are gone, then merge the herd together. If we had space, we’d probably keep different age groups on separate pastures full-time.
After pulling each kid, we weigh them, give a dose of vitamin supplements (we like Survive!), and then provide colostrum replacer ASAP (we use Shepherd’s Choice because it has the highest IgG we could find and the kids like it). Over the next 24 hours, we give them as much colostrum replacer and/or heat treated maternal colostrum that they will eat, providing 2-4 ounces every 2-4 hours. We sometimes have to tube feed, but it is absolutely critical that each kid gets a minimum of 10% of their body weight in colostrum within 24 hours of birth (and as much as possible within 12 hours). We like doing half colostrum replacer and half maternal colostrum because the replacer might cover something the maternal is lacking, and the maternal will have antibodies to local contagions. The best case scenario is to test each batch of maternal colostrum and give only that if it proves to be better than the replacer, but we’re usually frazzled and half asleep during kidding and just want to get the kids fed before it’s too late.
After that first critical day, we bottle feed pasteurized goat milk (or replacer if the girls aren’t producing enough) about 4-5 times per day for the first couple weeks, then drop to twice per day because we have jobs and can’t do more than that long-term. These are our favorite bottles and nipples – they’re super easy to clean and hold up longer than others we’ve tried. We also really like these nipples – they’re a little bigger, but a lot more expensive. A note on replacer: some people online will freak out about how bad replacer is. Not all replacers are made the same – Shepherd’s Choice has successfully been used by top breeders for years and does not contain soy, which is the part that can be dangerous. Shepherd’s Choice does include a coccidistat, which we’re not huge fans of, but it’s a great option otherwise. Just make sure to carefully prepare it according to the instructions. If that is too complicated or risky, an alternative is plain whole cow milk from the grocery store.
As the kids grow older and more able to tolerate larger amounts without gorging, we introduce willing ones to buckets with nipples on them at about 3-4 weeks. NOT open buckets without nipples – you want to maintain the suck reflex to make sure that milk gets into the right stomach. Pan/bucket feeding isn’t 100% deadly like some people believe, but it’s still not ideal & why tempt fate if not needed? Every now and then, a kid refuses to use our buckets. We’re pushovers, so we have a whole bottle/bucket wall for picky ones to choose from. Remind me to post one of the feeding charts at some point (or you can google one).
At 3-14 days of age, we have the vet disbud each non-polled kid. Most breeders do it themselves and we still do if the vet is busy, but we like that he uses injectable painkillers and/or knocks them out. Does that make us soft? I guess, but our goats are more than just livestock to us and we do everything we can to make their lives as pain-free as possible. The ideal scenario is to leave horns on, but it’s just too risky with fencing and unnatural herd dynamics, with members forced together when they’d normally go off on their own. Plus if we want to show our goats, they can’t have horns. Even after disbudding carefully, some goats still end up with some scurs – especially the Oberhasli bucklings – but it happens to everyone we know, even top breeders around the country.
We sometimes provide grain to kids during weaning to help them keep weight on – usually only bucklings, because we keep doelings on milk for much longer than most people do. We wean bucklings at 10-14 weeks depending how they’re growing and let the girls stay on bottles until fall, sometimes 20+ weeks. We can’t legally sell milk and are too busy to make stuff with it, so it’s just easier to keep giving it to the kids. It’s a win-win! All goats get unlimited grass and/or alfalfa hay and water from birth, as well.
Milkers
We try our best to be present for every birth so that we can pull kids before they start suckling. We let dams lick some afterbirth off our hands to help convince them to adopt us as their kids, and MOST gladly allow us to milk them without too much fight afterwards. After gently milking as much colostrum as we can, we offer the doe warm water with added molasses & Dyne vitamins. We also give a dose of oral CMPK – they absolutely hate it, but it helps strengthen contractions to remove the placenta.
After kidding, we immediately start milking 2x per day, keeping colostrum-rich milk separate from normal milk for about a week & freezing the best for emergencies. Every now and then, a doe decides to be a butthead about milking for a while, but they all calm down within a few weeks.
While on the milk stand, does get as much grain as they want. We mix a custom organic blend of oats, cracked corn, barley, and sometimes beet pulp and black oil sunflower seeds. Sometimes a girl needs a little extra fat and we’ll remove the beet pulp and add Triple Crown Equine Senior Gold. It’s not organic, but is very highly regarded in the show community. And of course, they also get 24/7 access to grass and/or alfalfa hay – we try to give them 100% alfalfa but sometimes have trouble finding supply. In those times, we use alfalfa pellets.
One of the most important parts of keeping goats healthy is finding a quality loose mineral. NOT blocks – goats have trouble consuming enough minerals off blocks and often wear down their teeth prematurely when nomming on them. We bounce between Sweetlix and Crafts-Min Goat, depending on availability. Another we’d love to try is Duraferm Concept Aid, and another we’ve considered is the one from Premier 1. All of our goats get a container of mineral blend and one of plain white livestock salt. We also sometimes provide Zinpro, selenium salt, and/or kelp. We do NOT offer baking soda unless we are opening a new pasture or know that a goat is unwell. Goats naturally create their own sodium bicarbonate in their rumens and having free access to an external supply can throw off that balance.
In 2024, we’re trying the FCE Mineral Buffet because three of our does and one buck seem to be missing something & we’re not sure what. Some people love the buffet concept and some bash it – we figure we’ll give it a year and switch back to something else if it doesn’t work for us! We bought our supply directly from FCE, but if you’re interested and don’t have a need for a bunch of 25lb bags, Little Avalon Farm has made a business of repackaging the FCE minerals into smaller portions.
*Please note that these are our personal opinions and experiences, and our statements are not intended to be professional or medical advice in any way. We have added links to products that we have used. We are in no way affiliated with the vendors or brands, and we receive no reward or recognition for linking them.
*Please note that these are our personal opinions and experiences, and our statements are not intended to be professional or medical advice in any way. We have added links to products that we have used. We are in no way affiliated with the vendors or brands, and we receive no reward or recognition for linking them.
A LOT of breeders use meds to prophylactically prevent coccidia in their kids. We’re trying to develop a herd with natural resistance, so we don’t bring out the drugs unless we need to. We DO use herbal protocols to help prevent coccidiosis, though. Every week, we add an herbal treatment to our kids’ milk bottles (we switch between Land of Havilah or Fir Meadows or Verm Oust).
If a kid is diagnosed with coccidiosis & if natural remedies don’t seem to be working, we’ll use Albon or SMZ-TMP, a sulfa drug. If that kid becomes overloaded again, we move to Toltrazuril – NOT the scammy HorsePreRace one (google it – the owner has been arrested multiple times for having unsanitary facilities and mislabeling drugs). We use either Zuricox or Baycox brands, which are legally regulated formulations (in other countries). Toltrazuril for goats is kinda in a gray area legally in the US. It’s approved for goats in other countries, but not here yet, so beware if you plan to raise your kids for meat. The meat withdrawal is super long – some people say up to 150 days! We never, ever use Corid/Amprolium on goats. It can cause deadly B12 deficiencies and just isn’t worth it when we’ve got better options.
If a kid ends up needing multiple treatments, we generally get them healthy and rehome them as a pet because they lack the resistance we’re hoping to achieve in our herd.
Albon antibiotic dosage: 25mg/lb orally first dose, then 12.5mg/lb daily for 4 days. Can also treat some strains of pneumonia. 7 day meat withdrawal, 60 hour milk withdrawal.
Toltrazuril 5% dosage: 1cc/5.5lbs orally once every 10 days. 150 day meat withdrawal, 42 day milk withdrawal per USDA but other governments have shorter times.
This one was new to us in 2024! When we asked our vet how to treat entamoeba, he told us to use Safeguard. That was definitely incorrect. Entamoeba is a protozoan parasite, not a worm. After a bunch of research, we found Specto-Guard Scour Halt (prescription now required), and that did the trick. This med is risky, though – some people say that it can stop GI peristalsis, which would be fatal for a goat.
Specto-Guard Scour Halt antibiotic dosage: Under 10lbs: 2cc orally 2x/day for 3-5 days, Over 10lbs: 4cc orally 2x/day for 3-5 days. 3 day meat withdrawal, no milk withdrawal has been established.
The very best way to prevent worms is dry lotting goats, where they don’t have access to grass & only get feed that is brought in. That’s unnatural to most people and it’s verrrry expensive to have to supply ALL feed, so we use the second best worm prevention: pasture rotation. We don’t have a whole lot of land to work with, but we still manage to split our pasture into multiple smaller sections using electrified poultry nets. Every week or so, we move the net to a fresh area and give each used section a rest of 30+ days before cycling back through.
We still have had a few breakthrough worm infections here and there, so we started using Livamol® with BioWorma® for the first time this year. It’s a feed additive that contains spores for a fungus that eats worm larvae. Over time, the goats will seed the pasture with this fungus and it should hopefully decrease the parasite load.
Another natural product that people swear by is Lespedeza, a legume crop with high tannins. It’s not affordable for our herd size, but would be awesome for smaller groups!
We’ve also had luck with BiteMe! treats, and also with an essential oil protocol that I’ll include later. Another old-school treatment starting to gain popularity again is soapy water, that I’ll add info about later. And some people use free choice LOH.
Sometimes, we still need to resort to meds if natural treatment doesn’t work. I’ll try to find a dewormer chart at some point.
External Parasites
The does have gotten lice from their hay a couple times in the fall/winter/early spring. Lice generally go away on their own once summer hits and we pretty much ignore them, but if we do notice that a doe has a heavy load, we sprinkle sulfur powder over her back for a few days in a row.
Mites, on the other hand, suck! We have one doe who has been fighting them since before she came to us (Gazelle). We’re positive that her breeder knew something was up and sold her to us at full price anyway. We’ve hit her with every mineral we could find in case she was deficient and started the FCE buffet to try to help her, but she still has them. It’s definitely mites – she has that telltale sticky gritty substance in her hocks. We are trying injectable Dectomax for her right now because sulfur powder, NuStock, lime-sulfur dip, Cylence pour-on, Eprinex pour-on, and injectable Ivermectin didn’t work. We know that we should probably sell her as a pet or food, but Riesling is very attached to her and she has so many other great qualities that we haven’t given up on her yet.
Cylence pour-on dosage:
Eprinex pour-on dosage:
Ivermectin injectable dosage (injected subcutaneously for external parasites but administered orally for worms):
Dectomax injectable dosage (injected subcutaneously for external parasites but administered orally for worms):
We’ve unfortunately dealt with pneumonia for two years in a row now. Goats are SO prone to it if conditions aren’t perfect, and Wisconsin is anything but perfect – constantly bouncing from wet to dry to hot to cold. We did our best to avoid vaccines, but we now give all of our keepers an intranasal called Nasalgen 3 PMH – it’s officially labeled for cattle, but our vet says that it has done well in studies for goats and might be labeled for them soon, too. It helps develop resistance to a few common causes of pneumonia, and to us, one annual squirt up the nose is less bad than a week+ of antibiotics, potential permanent loss of lung function, and/or death. We realize that vaccines are a personal decision and only vaccinate our keepers unless a buyer requests that we do theirs, too.
When our goats come down with respiratory infections, we first treat them holistically with herbs and VetRX (which is basically Vicks VaporRub for livestock). We check daily and sometimes multiple times for day for fever. At the first sign of a fever, if a goat is also looking sick in other ways, we move to antibiotics because pneumonia can kill in an hour. There is a ton of conflicting info about dosages online, but this is what our vet prescribed:
Draxxin antibiotic dosage: 1.1cc/100lbs injected subcutaneously. Once per week, total of two times for 14 day coverage. This is the first one to try – if no improvement after 2 days, use another antibiotic between Draxxin doses. 18 day meat withdrawal, not to be used in milk-producing animals or within 2 months of start of milk production. Vendor recommends 48 day milk withdrawal if it has to be used in a milk-producing animal.
Banamine NSAID dosage: 2cc/100lbs injected intravenously or intramuscularly are best, subcutaneously is less effective. Once per day for no more than 3 days or can cause severe kidney damage. This is for fever & inflammation and is not an antibiotic. 4 day meat withdrawal, 36 hour milk withdrawal.
Resflor Gold antibiotic – includes banamine so DO NOT give extra – dosage: 6cc/100lbs injected subcutaneously. Once every other day for a week. An alternative dosage we’ve seen is 3cc/100lbs once per day for 5 days. 5 day meat withdrawal, 36 hour milk withdrawal. Our vet only gave us this one because he was out of Nuflor, which he prefers for goats.
Baytril 100 antibiotic – LAST RESORT – dosage: 1.1cc/45lbs injected subcutaneously. Once per day for 3 days. An alternative dosage we’ve seen is 4cc/100lbs once per day for 5 days. Last resort because this antibiotic is used in humans and doctors want to prevent resistance. 6 day meat withdrawal, 96 hour milk withdrawal.
Will add more holistic and Western pneumonia treatments/meds we’ve used at some point.
We have dealt with bloat a couple times. The absolute worst was when the bucks busted through a fence and shattered a tub of chicken feed. They gorged themselves and bloated up within a couple hours. They were huge and drum-tight and standing groaning uncomfortably. We called the vet out, and she stomach tubed them full of a prescription-grade version of Therabloat, activated charcoal, and water. She injected them with massive doses of Penicillin (prescription now required) to help fight enterotoxemia and Vitamin B Complex to keep the rumen working. She instructed us to keep doing that for a few days, and also to provide Probios and electrolytes – she specified Gatorade if we didn’t have a livestock one (we used Bluelite). In the end, our BFF Mark passed away after a week, when we thought he was safe.
We had been debating whether to use the CDT vaccine, which helps immunize against enterotoxemia and tetanus, and that event solidified our decision. Like the Pneumonia vaccine, we only treat our keepers and not kids for sale unless requested. We use the Durvet CDT vaccine because it causes fewer welts than the less expensive Bar-Vac one.
That event also made us keep a stockpile of bloat treatments handy: we give human GasX at the first sign of true drum-tight bloat, then Therabloat if that doesn’t seem to be helping, and Milk of Magnesia or baking soda to help prevent acidosis. We also keep at least one bottle of Clostridium Antitoxin – if for any reason we suspect that a goat won’t recover within a couple hours, we use the antitoxin to prevent enterotoxemia from taking hold – yes, even with the CDT vaccine, it’s a possibility.
After a really gross week of rain and mud when we couldn’t keep the goat shelter dry enough, we had three does develop staph dermatitis on their udders. First, before every milking, we thoroughly washed each of the affected does with chlorhexidine diluted as instructed. After washing, we rinsed them off, because leaving it on is very drying. We then milked the affected does last after all the others, to prevent the others from catching it. They were milked into a separate bucket, and the milk was discarded because it would still be risky to feed the babies, even after pasteurizing. After milking, we thoroughly sprayed each doe with Fight-Bac. We made sure to wear clean gloves for washing, then new ones for milking – it’s super important to do everything possible to avoid letting the staph enter the udder and become mastitis.
We also gave each of the affected does a copper bolus – some studies indicate that copper deficiency allows staph to take hold.
The above treatments worked to resolve the staph on 2/3 of the does, but one needed extra help. She got BAD and the infection spread over her entire belly. We started coating her whole affected area with NuStock and Desitin diaper rash ointment. After TWO weeks, she finally kicked the dermatitis!
Some people recommend VIMCO, the S. Aureus vaccine. If we end up with recurring infections or with mastitis, we might try it, but we have managed to avoid it so far (*knock on wood*).
*Please note that these are our personal opinions and experiences, and our statements are not intended to be professional or medical advice in any way. We have added links to products that we have used. We are in no way affiliated with the vendors or brands, and we receive no reward or recognition for linking them.
*Please note that these are our personal opinions and experiences, and our statements are not intended to be professional or medical advice in any way. We have added links to products that we have used. We are in no way affiliated with the vendors or brands, and we receive no reward or recognition for linking them.
Here’s our list of must-have supplies:
1cc/mL syringes
3cc/mL luer lock syringes
6cc/mL luer lock syringes
10-12cc/mL syringes
16-18ga 1/2″-3/4″ needles
20-22ga 1/2″-1″ needles
Drenching gun(s)
Sterile gauze
Vet wrap
Sharp scissors
Scalpels
Therabloat
GasX
Milk of Magnesia
Probios
Clostridium Antitoxin
Tetanus Antitoxin
Epinephrine – any treatment can cause a goat to have an anaphylactic reaction
Vet on speed dial for antibiotics
*Please note that these are our personal opinions and experiences, and our statements are not intended to be professional or medical advice in any way. We have added links to products that we have used. We are in no way affiliated with the vendors or brands, and we receive no reward or recognition for linking them.
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