Sick Goat Doing Good

On Sunday our herd sire could not urinate. Urine was still dripping steadily from him, so it wasn't a complete blockage, but I immediately suspected it was urinary calculi, a problem especially for male goats. I was so worried I was crying because it can be fatal and Bambi is such a nice buck. I have heard horror stories about bucks who are aggressive and dangerous to have around. This boy leads easily and is gentle with the does when breeding. I would hate to have lost him.

We called a vet - not many vets "know" goats, but there are handful who have some experience with goats, and are willing to give advice on the phone. (Vets make their money on horses, cows, dogs and cats, so tend to concentrate on those). The vet we called on Sunday does house calls, but not to our area of town, and he doesn't work on Sundays anyway. He said the other vets probably wouldn't come out on Sunday either. I read on the Internet that Ammonium Chloride can be given as an emergency treatment, so we set off to the nearby town we like to shop in to see if we could find any. None. A lot of things we look for to treat the goats is like that. No one seems to know what we are talking about. We ended up buying some herb combinations from the health food store. One was Uva Ursi and the other was Planetary Herbals Stone Free. Both items that humans would use for kidney problems or kidney/gallbladder stones. I made the "onion cure" which consists of one large onion, 6 cloves of garlic and the juice of four large lemons, cooked until the onion turns clear. I then strained the mixture and watered it down just a little bit. I opened several capsules of Uva Ursi and crushed several of the Stone Free product. Mixed into a gravy like mixture and drenched the buck with it.

He was straining so hard to urinate, poor guy. I was worried about him all night, and then dh and I had to leave to work on Monday and I was afraid we'd come home to find him dead. But we got home and he was not only alive, but peeing and headbutting with his buddy! I had managed to find the Ammonium Chloride from a chemical store in the big city and we drenched him with a heaping teaspoon of that mixed with water, just in case he had any other stones that still needed to be dissolved.

So that was a big relief. Now we will need to figure out what to do for maintenance. One of the big problems is bucks should not be fed the same as does. The does get alfalfa hay and wow, what a difference good hay can make! Two of my milkers that normally give me around 2 pounds of milk each day are now up to over 3 pounds! The hay we'd been getting delivered from the nearby hay dealer is apparently poor quality hay for goats. I guess they call it horse hay, and handpick it for horses. They like the hay to be stemmy and have hardly any tender green leaves - to prevent the horse from bloating. Tender green stems and leaves is what the goats need to make more milk. It is hard to find anything but alfalfa hay in our area. And to complicate matters, the bucks hate grass (bermuda) hay. AND since the grass hay is harder to come by, it is more expensive than alfalfa.

So today is day four of mine and dh's four day work week. Ds2 has really taken up the slack for us regarding cooking. We've had hot meals ready to eat upon arriving home, which helps a lot since the first thing we have to do upon arriving home is chores and milking. Then it's a quick shower, dinner and off to bed shortly. 3:30am gets here really fast. The past three days have not been too bad, but I am, as usual (how did you guess?) tired. I have also been sick again!! I am really frustrated at my body's low defenses against illness. This time it started out on Monday as a tickling cough and then a really tight feeling in my upper chest/lower throat. I have been taking grapefruit seed extract (gross stuff, tastes like drinking a shot of dishwashing detergent) and lots of Vitamin C and today I'm coughing up nearly clear um, stuff. That is better than it was!

It's now 10 to 7:00. I'd better get busy working.

Until next time.