my 6 year old doe kidded on april 14 2015. about a week ago i noticed hair loss. she was wormed on jan 8 with safeguard, 2.5 mls.
i wasn't sure if it was winter coat coming out. when i got her she was in a very small enclosure it was about 3'x2'x6' lwh and held 2 goats (both nd's ,but still)
so anyways, i thought at first it was normal, ya know like how dogs loose their winter coat. but after looking close, i'm not sure? her hair looks thin, her thin hair is really dark almost black.
i have safeguard. should i give her more with her having had some jan 8. my buddy told me to put them on a monthly worming schedule. tell me what you think , please.
i'm putting in some pics
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makes sense. and we got her in early to mid january so haven't been in it long
I have a darker buck that gets sun faded over the summer (you can tell the difference between sun fade and copper fading, because sun fading happens on the OUTER layer of the hair shafts, and copper fading happens from the skin out.) so when he sheds in the spring, his new goat is darker than his old one.
that is what i thought at first (reminded me of my lab).but when her hair was different shade we jumped the gun again and thought maybe something else.
thank you
Looking at your photos, it looks like she might just be blowing her winter coat... and doing it slowly. Slow shedding *can* be a sign of copper deficiency, so you might want to dose with COWP again. It's been a while, so it definitely can't hurt. You don't have to put the COWP in anything. Just sprinkle it over some grains, and let her eat them up. I found some inexpensive "goat dose" COWP on Amazon. http://amzn.com/B00N3921MU
Have you recently given COWP? I had a goat with serious copper issues, and she blew her coat really hard when I got her bolused. Since the hair coming in looks darker than the outer coat of your goat, I wondered if you might have given her some copper or new minerals?
Hair loss has nothing to do with worms, and deworming on a schedule is an idea from the 1990s, which has been proven to cause a problem with dewormer resistance, so you should only deworm when absolutely necessary. This is the short version on this topic. I spend 24 pages on it in Raising Goats Naturally.
Yes, goats do blow their undercoat in spring, but if you have huge patches of bare skin, that's more likely to be due to lice or mites or a zinc deficiency. You can see lice if you part the hair around the shoulders and watch for 15 to 20 seconds to see if anything is crawling through the hair. It causes hair loss because one type of lice chew up hair but also because the goat is itchy and usually rubbing. If you're not seeing the goat rubbing on anything to cause the hair loss, then it's more likely due to zinc deficiency or something else nutritional.