I have a 5 year old pregnant doe (Ella) due in two weeks and two pregnant yearlings that are all loosing hair by the handful and Ella has giant flakes of skin on her udder. All have excessive dandruf and seem itchy. It looks like zinc deficiency and I know our well water is high in iron so maybe thats why. Ella, who is mostly black, has lots of red in her coat which looks like copper issues but no fishtail and the hair she's lost is mostly on her face and ears. I copper bolused a month ago when I noticed the red in her coat but it's gotten worse since then. I've seen some people recommending TrueCare minerals but those are not available anywhere I can find and ZinPro which is so incredibly expensive it seems like there has to be a better solution for just three does. Any suggestions? The vet doesn't know anything about goats so no help there.
I feed good grass hay free choice
purina goat minerals free choice which they are devouring
Ella gets a little grain and alfalfa pellets since she's nearly due
Replies
Well I thought I'd post a little update because quite a bit has happened since I originally posted this question. Violet and Minty lost all the hair from their necks to their tails and down the backs of their legs but their sides and bellys are still fluffy. The hair has been growing back but it started with cashmere and then the hair started growing after that. With just cashmere on those spots they looked like they were moldy. Now they have nice short coats in the areas that lost hair and still have their long winter coats in the places where it didn't fall out so they look very silly right now. When it decides to warm up and stay warm I'll clip them so they don't look like they got bad haircuts 🤣 The weather has been absolutely ridiculous swinging from 70s to freezing and snowing just a couple days later so I guess that could have caused them to start dropping their winter coats and then stop. I don't really know. They all have bad dandruf so that's weird too. I'll probably never know what happened.
Last Friday Ella gave birth to 3 healthy doelings. One of them is a cute black and white cow like her mama. She's starting to loose the red in her coat and looks like she's feeling much better now that she isn't carrying triplets. She's being a fantastic mom.
Thanks for the update!
I'm so glad that they are growing in new hair. I know it was really stressing you out. What an odd sequence of events with the whole experience
Babies are just as cute as they can be. Thanks for the adorable photos!
Tammy
I'm baffled as well. I'm not sure how long the hair follicle cycle is in goats, but if this is some sort of full on coat dump, you should start to see new peach fuzz coming in, within a few weeks.
Did you have any sort of weird weather pattern where it was really cold and then got unseasonably warm? I'm just brainstorming now-LOL!
I really feel like there would be much more dandruff and unhealthy looking skin if this were a zinc deficiency so profound that it caused this amount of hair loss. But, if you want to try an increase in Zinc, you could switch your minerals to SweetLix MeatMaker. It has 3 times as much zinc as Purina and still excellent concentration of other minerals as well.
If they are in otherwise healthy condition, I just don't think that I would do anything else right now since Ella is so close to her due date. An increase in nutrition, which we already talked about, should help with new hair growth, especially if this is not zinc related.
Also- I looked at a couple cafeteria style mineral programs, hoping that maybe someone had an organic form of zinc, but all I can find in their ingredients is zinc sulfate which is an inorganic form, so that was a bust. But if this is a zinc issue, switching to SLMM mineral may be all that is needed.
Tammy
Ok thank you. We have had super weird weather. It's in the mid 50s one day and then 20s the next. Maybe it's just that they can't figure out whether they want a warm coat or not.
Please let us know how this turns out. I'd love to know what happens with hair growth in the patchy areas over the next few weeks :)
tammy
I'll do that. Thanks so much for your time!
Your welcome :)
There are a few short hairs there that are curly and rough but I'm not seeing any healthy new growth. It's just so weird that it's coming out in tufts and concentrating in certain spots, rather than an even shedding. I've never seen that before.
Hi Heather
Would you mind posting some full body shots so we can have a better idea of what you are describing? A picture is always worth a 1000 words!
Thanks
tammy
It's kind of hard to see in the pictures but you can definitely see the bare patches on Ella's nose and cheek. The one with the light blue collar (minty) has thin patches on her shoulders as well as the base of her ears. The chocolate one (violet) is loosing literal hadfuls from the backs of her rear legs. That hair I'm holding is just from scratching her back legs for a few seconds.
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