I am still waiting on my panels, I'm going to get some wire for a stationary pen in the meantime...it will still be useful even after I get the panels I am sure!
Now, what I read suggested that with pasturing, and rotational grazing there will be worms, but it also suggested that barberpole worms are the worst and don't make it very high up on tall grass. Which I have push mowers and it grows a couple feet between mowing so I guess that could be helpful.
This article also suggested that a " dry lot" would practically eliminate the worms. But there would be a greater risk of e coli and other...bad junk. Do you feel that the difficulty in treating the maladies are = < or > treating for worms, and how so? What I was thinking is that the medicines for treating these conditions might be more effective overall than the worming... but I can't really tell.
Do you have a link for information on how a person would recognize symptoms of these dry lot problems?
Thanks for your help again!
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well not after last summer I had a bigger problem besides worms TICKS and I don't mean one or two my girls neck were covered with the little suckers. I had 3 does abort and lost a doe. Never again will I let them out to browse. So they stay in their pens with access to Hay 24/7 and I feed them grain daily we do have grass in our pens so I still have to check for worms. I think with pens the biggest thing is poop build up which we live on a hill so the poop pretty much goes down hill with a good rain. Also over crowding is not good that's when you will really run into health problems.
britt greenland said:
I know I saw that somewhere.....wish I could remember where. It was something like $5.
I did try it with a fecalizer, and I think I did it properly. I did see a few eggs, but I also saw things that I wasn't sure I could identify either way. I guess I need more practice manipulating the slide to make sure I cover all the area without getting lost.
$80?!?! Even $35 is outrageous! If there was a post on here about where you could send a fecal sample, I haven't seen it. Don't know if you've seen this yet, but it tells you how to do your own:
http://www.fiascofarm.com/goats/fecals.htm
I don't do an official count. I just criss cross the slide and if I find less than five or six eggs on the whole slide, I'm very happy. In cases where an animal is really in trouble, you can count as many as 30-40 without even moving the slide. Just start doing them, comparing them to your animal's body condition score (1-5 with 1 being skeleton and 5 being obese; 3 perfect), poop (berries, good; logs, bad), and eyelids (red, good; white, bad). When I started, I took a single poop sample and did three or four fecals on it. A fecal only requires about three berries, so if you have a dixie cup full of berries, you might as well practice. If you're not 100% sure of exactly how to do something, try it a couple different ways with the samples, and see which method gets the most eggs to float and stick to your slide.
A new dewormer has not been developed since the 1980s, which is why there is a problem now. Whether you're talking about dewormers, antibiotics, or weed killers, it seems that they will only work well for about 20-30 years, and then you start seeing resistance in the worms, bacteria, weeds, etc.
So, as with all of those things, we should not use them indiscriminately. The problem with dewormer resistance happened because everyone thought that they had conquered worms in the 1980s with the development of all the new dewormers, so they figured that if they just dewormed all their animals on a regular basis, they would never lose another goat or sheep to worms. This info was still being given by vets six or seven years ago, and those that are not educated on sheep and goat parasites are still saying to follow this regime today. I was at the U of I vet school six years ago when I first started hearing that this advice was actually creating a problem.
The most current research is on www.wormcontrol.org, but the basic advice now is that you do not give a dewormer unless an animal is anemic. Anemia is what kills animals. You will NEVER have a goat that has no worms, because they eat off the ground. Multiple vets have told me that although you might sometimes get a fecal that doesn't have any worm eggs, it doesn't mean that the goat has no worms. It just means they are not shedding the eggs in that particular poop. So, while a fecal can confirm that an anemic goat is overloaded with parasites, it can't rule it out. The FAMACHA system was developed so that you can check a goat's anemia status in the barn with a quick glance at the eyelid, rather than drawing blood. They correlated eyelid color with iron status. It is not as easy to do without the card as you would think. I've been doing it for a few years, and figuring out 1 and 5 are easy, but ones in the middle are harder to figure out if you don't have the card right there. If you ever have the chance to attend FAMACHA training, I'd highly recommend it. Basically, the more often you use a dewormer, the faster you'll get a resistance problem, especially if you have a lot of animals on a small amount of pasture, so not overloading your pastures is also an important part of the picture.