We have 2 wethers and a doe, all about 9 months. Female came into heat this time and one boy who's more dominant anyway is really beating the daylights out of the other boy, who is pretty shy. The doe and shy boy are twins, but they all were born at same time and raised together.
When I remove the tough boy, the twins get along fine and are quite a bit calmer. Is there any solution to this other than isolating the tough guy every time she's in heat?
tnx
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Well I think I've decided to not do anything. Both males are neutered, they're very docile and happy to sit on our laps. But they'r'e only 9 months so hopefully their friendly disposition won't change. Thanks for the input.
Those look more like horns than scurs. If you had just showed me the pictures without saying anything, I'd think they were never disbudded. It is not going to be easy to remedy the situation. It's great that the vet isn't going to charge you for dehorning at this point, but it's going to be ugly.
If the last goat he did was a doe, they are much easier to disbud than bucks/wethers.
Light colored goat is shy guy, missing one horn. Dark colored goat is tough guy, although they look fairly well formed in this photo, they're actually a bit deformed and not quite symmetric.
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I'll take some photos tomorrow if they'll hold still long enough. Thanks for your time.
My wife was there when he did the disbudding , he did move to a different building, and the last goat he did there has no evidence of horns. It was difficult to look for a power outlet when the animal was under anesthesia. He's a farm vet, he does mostly commercial farms that raise cattle, sheep and goats. But now this area also has hobby farmers (like us) that have pet goats, llamas, alpacas, etc. My confidence level in him is high, he was completely honest about what went wrong and said he'd fix it for free. Can't ask much more than that.
I did find this link which has great photos of wire trimming scurs.
If they're 3" long, that could be more than just scurs. That could be a totally botched job. Unless you've seen other goats that this vet has done, I wouldn't let him touch the goats again. Electrical failure isn't an excuse for a bad disbudding job. If there was a problem with the electricity, he should have known at the time and asked you to take the goats to a place with good electricity to do the job properly. Can you post a picture that would give us a better idea of whether these are true scurs or horns?
Scurs aren't like horns as far as nerves go, from what I understand. My bucks don't seem to care when theirs get knocked off, but to answer your question, I think that if you're trimming already short scurs, about an inch would be plenty.
Thanks for that link, I like the idea of trimming the scurs. My goats aren't deformed like the ones in that photo, his are like small, properly shaped horns that are about 3" long.
If you use the wire saw to trim them, do you just take off the last inch or so to avoid blood vessels and nerves?
Whoops! Not a video, but a discussion. :) Found it. http://nigeriandwarfgoats.ning.com/forum/topics/removal-of-huge-scu...
Personally, I feel that horned goats are dangerous. Their horns can cause a lot of issues, and most of them are accidental. They can get caught in fencing, and in some cases being caught in a fence can cause enough panic for a goat to strangle themselves. I know it seems as though they are "almost never unattended" but it doesn't take much.
Horns are also a risk to the goats they are with, and seeing as this post is about aggression, that means (to me) that there is some headbutting/battling going on.
I have also heard about enough accidents where a goat swung their horned head just the right way, and ended up seriously injuring their owners.
In my opinion, I would leave the scurs. You can safely trim them to keep them from growing into the skull. There is a video here about that, I believe. I'll see if I can find it. My boys have pretty bad scurs, and they knock them off once in a while, but I just put some iodine on them, and keep an eye out for issues. There are oinments to protect wounds from flies. I'd be more apt to use those than to re burn on scurs.
Mark said:
Talked to vet who did dehorning, he suggested having it redone and he would do it for free. He remembered this situation, there was a problem with power tripping off at barn where he did this. He said there can be a number of problems with scurs, they can grow into skull, in the summer if they break there can be issues with flies and maggots in the wound. And like regular horns they can get hung up on things and injure themselves. It's too cold around here for the next few weeks to do this, he doesn't want them to get anaesthesia because they don't regulate their temp properly so it needs to be moderate temps. I'm not sure what to do. Now that I"ve read a bit about this I'm not sure why we even had them dehorned at all. These are not livestock, they're pets and almost never unattended, and spend most of the day in the barn with one of us. Anyway, it seems like a fair bit of trauma to put these guys through again.
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