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  • Hello from Florida! We are basically a parasite paradise and battle things like Barberpole and coccidia year round. I began using Oregano essential oil (heavily diluted) in conjunction with sweet orange essential oil as a treatment/preventative. I have a very small farm (1 acre). The does have 2 pens that we rotate back and forth every 2 months. Each pen is about 1/4 acre. I have had really good success with the essential oil in addition to fir meadow herbal wormers on my goats. 

    I use oregano oil and Fir Meadow Gi-soother  as a coccidia preventative in my kids and have Toltrazuril as a back-up. I mix 1 drop of oregano EO in 5mL of olive oil and give each kid one (1) mL of that dilution twice a day for 3 days in a row. During that time they also get a pinch of GI-soother twice a day. I have not had any issues with coccidia this year using this method. I've found that the oregano also makes them expel tapes! 

    For my adult does I do 1 drop of oregano EO and 2 drops of sweet orange EO in 6mL of olive oil and give that twice a day for 3 days, then do a second round 10 days later.  Orange oil has been shown to be effective in the treatment and control of barberpole worms, and I have had very good results. 

    I also leave a mixture of the GI-soother, Deworm A and Thorvin kelp out in the mineral feeder free choice. Since I started doing this everyone looks great! The kids eat it a lot more than the adults do. 
    This may not work for everyone, but it has been very effective on my farm. I also feed Lespedeza pellets as their evening feeding. I have not noticed any strange flavor in the milk. They didn't like it at first, but they are such piggies that they eat it anyway lol. 

    be careful using essential oils. They (especially oregano) can cause liver damage, so make sure they are properly diluted before use. From my understanding, oil of oregano is just very diluted oregano essential oil. I bought myself a bottle of expensive Oil of Oregano capsules, then went to the company website and discovered diluted oregano essential oil is all that it was lol. 

    I can't speak to how effective oregano would be by itself because I've always used it in conjunction with other things, but I really feel like it has helped here a lot with coccidia and tapes. 

  • I never said that DE works as a dewormer. In fact, I said quite the opposite. If your vet recommended monthly deworming, then he or she is not aware of the research that has been done in the last ten years that shows that WILL lead to dewormer resistance. There is not one single reputable source that says you should deworm monthly. Ivermectin may work initially, but it won't work if you continue to use it monthly. The worms will become resistant to it just as bacteria become resistant to antibiotics if you use them regularly.

    Barber pole worms kills by sucking blood and making the goat anemic. Once the worms are dead, they are no longer sucking blood, so if the ivermectin worked, then the worms could not have killed him. I've had goats come back from a FAMACHA score of 1 (meaning severely anemic) after being given a dewormer. But more than ten years ago -- when a vet told me to give a dewormer every month -- I wound up sitting there watching goats die even though I had given them ivermectin and Cydectin and everything else that was commercially available. Just as the research shows, the worms on my farm had become resistant to all of the chemical dewormers, and they no longer worked. If you have other goats, I really hope you will read the info I linked above because you will find yourself with more dead goats if you continue deworming monthly.

    Darleen Somley said:

    Dusty died because the breeder used DE. He was infested when I got him. Ivermec cleared up the worms but the damage was done and he never fully recovered. My vet recommended monthly worming with Ivermec and never expect DE to do the job. 

    Just my experience with diamatious earth.

  • Dusty died because the breeder used DE. He was infested when I got him. Ivermec cleared up the worms but the damage was done and he never fully recovered. My vet recommended monthly worming with Ivermec and never expect DE to do the job. 

    Just my experience with diamatious earth.

  • While research has not shown that DE is a good dewormer, current research for the past ten years has repeatedly shown that regularly using using any chemical dewormers is a losing strategy because parasites become resistant to it. Since there are only three classes of dewormer in the US, you can wind up having NO dewormer that works on your farm. We wound up with worms resistant to Ivomec (ivermectin) ten years ago. So when you say you are using it regularly, I do hope that you are not deworming on a schedule and just mean that it's the dewormer that you use ONLY when it is necessary. If Dusty died from parasites in spite of you using ivermectin, then it sounds like you have a problem with resistance already. When a dewormer works, goats don't die. Here is more on that topic: 

    https://thriftyhomesteader.com/dewormer-resistance-in-goats/ 

    Darleen Somley said:

    Diatomaceous earth seems fine....until it isn't. I got my first pair of goats from a breeder who uses DE for worming. A few weeks later I had to rush the buck to the vets because Dusty was very off his feed and lethargic. The vet told me that diamaceous earth is NOT a wormer. I went to Ivermec and use that regularly now. Unfortunately, Dusty had been so riddled with worms (as was Molly, the other goat I purchased at the time) that he was never really healthy and we lost him shortly after the hurricane last year.

    Trish said:

    I just use DE  -- Diatomaceous Earth, it's great!

  • Diatomaceous earth seems fine....until it isn't. I got my first pair of goats from a breeder who uses DE for worming. A few weeks later I had to rush the buck to the vets because Dusty was very off his feed and lethargic. The vet told me that diamaceous earth is NOT a wormer. I went to Ivermec and use that regularly now. Unfortunately, Dusty had been so riddled with worms (as was Molly, the other goat I purchased at the time) that he was never really healthy and we lost him shortly after the hurricane last year.

    Trish said:

    I just use DE  -- Diatomaceous Earth, it's great!

  • You're welcome  :-)  Have fun!

  • Thanks to you both :) 

  • Just relax, observe and love them...they will be fine.  Great that you're doing research  :-)

  • If you are milking your goats for human consumption, you are not supposed to feed them a medicated feed because it gets in the milk. No one knows what it will do to you, but most of us have dairy animals so that we can have drug-free milk, so giving drugs to a milk goat kind of defeats the purpose. But if your goats are just pets, and you're not drinking their milk, then it's not a big deal.

    One reason I wrote Raising Goats Naturally was to weed through facts versus opinions and to help people understand why they hear conflicting information. In the past, everyone who wrote goat books had only their own experience to go on, which is great on their farm. But I've been online since I got my first goats in 2002, so I learned pretty quickly that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to raising goats. You have to know the facts about goats, meds, etc in order to figure out how to best raise goats on your farm. I know people four miles from me who would be raising their goats totally differently than I do (if they had goats) because they don't have sulfur in their well water like we do, so that changes the whole nutritional game. So, you can either copy someone's management and hope it works for you and then continually make random adjustments until you figure out how to make it work -- or you can learn all of the facts (what goats need, symptoms of problems) and then figure out a management plan for your farm. And like I said in another post a few minutes ago -- they've only really started researching goats in the last 10 years, and unfortunately there is still a ton of old info floating around online.

  • Yeah, that's what is driving me a bit nutty... Guess we'll do what I see as essential and be ready to figure things out and do what is necessary. Thanks for all your help! It at least makes me not feel like a horrible person for not wanting to do the meds that the previous owner is recommending! 

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